


TFW (a dumb cunt exegesis)

by Pink_Siamese (orphan_account)



Category: Political RPF - US 21st c.
Genre: Crying, Emotional Infidelity, Epistolary, Experimental Style, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Female Character of Color, Feminist Themes, Guilt, Infidelity, Not Suitable/Safe For Work, POV First Person, POV Original Female Character, POV Second Person, Past Tense, Poetic, Present Tense, Workplace Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-23 22:33:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 32
Words: 35,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14342358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Pink_Siamese
Summary: So this is your old boss, who is nothing like your new boss, colonizing this room’s artificial silence. He is all she wants to talk about even though you’re no longer a part of anything to do with THE BUREAU“Aren’t you going to watch?”“I’ll read the transcript.”(& as if you ever told Jill—your colleague—that that part of your life was even a thing)





	1. danger riff

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted under manna_from_muscle.

TFW when your boss, or rather your old boss, re-enters your dreams like a danger riff

_Re-enters_ :

Because that’s some outer space shit, right there. Junk hurled at you to burn white-hot on its way down through all of your layers. No one ever thinks of the atmosphere—bruised clouds, huffy wind, screaming rain—what damages the sky sustains.

Oh hell no. It’s always gonna be erasing yourself down to nothing that gets all the press.

_Dreams_ :

These are night-narratives that don’t happen to you much anymore.

But back then, when you turned your back, when you walked away, on that day you were guided gently outward through a pair of glass doors, everything you accomplished trailed its breath first up your spine and then down. A single sweaty thought steadied the small of your back, held you as a handful of careful words cut your severance check. It put fingers on your forehead. It scattered the rest of your life all over your rickety feet.

Even when you should be sleeping, which is when it most feels like blame, you can face yourself. Tilt the mirror. Glide on a somber shade of lipstick & make your best goodbye face at the ghosts of all those minutes, pretend all that wet happening on your face isn’t real tears.

_Danger riff_ :

It’s a spastic violin, all thrust and muscle. Sometimes it’s slammed down by an electric guitar while background piano keys scrape up a sweet smoke, blow it into your mouth. It’ll coil down the inside of your throat to flirt with your lungs. It strikes your nerves alight. Your muscles wake up cranky and your body hairs can’t tell the difference between hot and cold. Your skin growls at itself.

The best ones conjure up spy movies and smoking guns, the sticky film of wrong moonlight, rope choking out a pair of nuzzling wrists, a scatter of metaphorical broken glass; you break the seal, let out the breath you didn’t know you were holding


	2. all these republican ladies

I have a friend who once said to me: have you noticed how all these republican ladies look the same?

But it’s a day at the beach for me—literally I’ve got feet on sand & ocean in my ears—when I look around and see just how much of this dusted-out topography is like a face. Not a human one—though of course even the free-range humanity around here is pretty sculpted—instead I’m talking about the way this land just sorta lies around all day, compliant under a vacant sky. How it pours all of its simmering languid energy back into manicuring itself.

She’s not American, this friend, so when she’s saying this thing she’s launching her query across the pond. She’s on the phone with me, her breathing restless, a cigarette burning somewhere near the receiver holes & going _jesus fucking christ Farrah why are they all so homogeneous_

The hills behind are far too busy jeweling up that shine with thick succulents and bougainvillea like fuchsia bloodstains to bother with weather. I mean…even the big blue water gets bored. It stirs up sand, yawns out fog, leaves it dirty and tattering all along a beige foreground. It’s just sunshine and heat shimmer, the myth of beaches, and a ruthless wind that sometimes rips down through the hills dry and hot and fierce enough to shove babies out of nests

Like I might have an answer, but I don’t. I’m American born & raised yeah but I’m not a soft white girl, all snowcapped & humble-lipped & flaxen enough to commit any kind of daring conformity acts

(& then soft darkness falls & the city pulls it up over all of her threadbare places, turns her back on the sunset, sends her her thirsty exhale out to glitter up all the lights)

I mean, some dude once asked me if I would waterboard him with my wet pussy

& I was like—shiver

But that shivering wasn’t all melty and hot and soft, or effervescent, or like leaving sleep behind to ascend into some new & savory world. It was more like maggots writhing their way up the back of my neck, feeling around for what’s bleeding. Like blind little worms all hopped up on adrenaline & praying for an open wound.

So I’m at the beach, I’ve got my hands in the cold Pacific, and I think about how each Los Angeles day is more beautiful than the last one

(& how that’s only true if you subscribe to the trademarked versions of what it means to be beautiful)

& the image that fills my mind is this: once upon a time, the sycamore tree in front of my work building was occupied by owls. One unstable night, just past February, the Santa Ana winds tore down out of the mountains and shook that tree until the unmoored branches tore the nest apart. I didn’t see the carnage for myself, but my colleague described it to me. Sweating it out beneath a slant of flaming bougainvillea, she agitated the orange-blossom air with her lips and talked about how the groundskeepers were always out there on the verge anyway, first thing in the morning, pulling half-eaten rabbit corpses & dead snakes out of the dew.

I look past the horizon & think _the progression of California time is exactly like that, each coastline day passes like the face of a pretty but dumb girl who smiles at everything_

Her empty sky eyes a symbol of what you want to be because a flickering propaganda man says so

Her dead grass hair a beauty fashioned out of powdered soil and missing water, stilled waves, a waiting dream of tiny flame-flowers

Her white skin a laundry accident & nothing more. She’s dumb because of a meat defect or because of certain well-bred deficits or simply because the only thing the world taught her from the cradle on up was how to bludgeon all the subtlety out of her language.

So, in other words, the death of that nest was nature-dictated & just. The business of raising children, after all, is an affront to an easy-happiness aesthetic. A mess might take your mind off work.

A manufactured-pretty face coaxes your eyes into rest but just for a moment & it always goes the extra mile so you don’t have to exert yourself

She’s a view to distract you while you eat before moving on.

& I guess if I had to answer my friend now, I’d say _because when you blend in it makes it that much easier to disappear._


	3. how to take contemporaneous notes

You can pierce a time-unit with a pen, you know.

Because it’s mightier than the sword, you know.

Unsheathe your weapon. Watch its foreshadowing fall across unoccupied lines. Push down, feel time itself fight back. Twist if you have to. Wrestle it down. What skin there is will break. Make it bleed, use that black & blue to your advantage but don’t forget to make a treaty with the paper first. Scribe your words in blood. Like a warrior.

Bite down while you do it. Feel the stirring roots of your teeth, a dull thud subsiding. Now you’re Amazonian, back before the word _amazon_ meant one-clicks and cardboard boxes and a lopsided smile with money buzzing all over the face of the world. A ferocity, a certain tendency toward ruthlessness, makes its home in your hand. While your pen moves, as you guide it, know that an Amazon is a woman who would cut off her own breast. She’d use a piece of glass snatched up off the alley floor to do it. She’d trade all of her potential milk-ooze for this sort of fluency in sharp objects.

Begin with a point in space. Cross it with time. You could use a date but your guts, freighted with iron, have all the gravity you need. Touch the space between your pancreas and the sick fluttery sensation that keeps translating itself into free-fall.

Don’t forget to breathe.

Choose a coordinate. But first open your eyes, take note of the sky. You’ll want to remember this light. Smell the wind. Rub the cuff of your cashmere coat between two white-knuckled fingers. Open your mouth, let a raindrop fall in. Taste its dream of cherry blossoms.

Remember that a car is a haven when you crave all the stillness. Get in. Buckle up, shut out the noisy world. Summon a silence out of your body. Now the world, she will press her face up against the glass. She’ll make too much heat and rattle your windows, squint, tap them with dirty nails. She might try to wash your shit for a dollar. She might fog you up with her words.

Ignore her.

You are an Amazon.

Now…choose a coordinate.

Unsheathe your weapon.

 _Reckon it this far from the shortest day, this far from the longest. On a day I ate too much. When my shadow balanced beneath me, toe-to-toe in every way. With wet light that grayed me out. In a restaurant like the belly of a ship—there’s too much dark wood, a deep carpeting not made for heels. In misted blue waterlight. In the back of a long narrow dining room, submerged in the eternal murmur of voices. With seafood. At the table all the prosecutors like because it’s shoved deep into a wallow of peace lilies yet not beside the kitchen, nor close to an exit, or on the well-worn bathroom path_.

You must consider sequence. People crave an order to put things in.

 _When the server made an ill-timed joke. When the upholstery generated too much heat between itself and the backs of my thighs_.

You could use a regular old clock but the echoes of your pulse, still humming in your fingertips, still whistling a little, contain enough room for all the truth you need. Remember that while chronology feels like a harvested thing, a system tilled out of heartbeats, it’s not.

_When the clink and hum became too much noise. When my hand forgot the purpose of a fork. When a slice of lemon just wasn’t strong enough, an ordinary swallow gone off the rails. My mouth begging the miracle, yearning water into wine._

Build a house out of words. You could choose something else but a well-scribed house is sturdy and comforting. It holds things in, assigns groups to rooms. Start with a blueprint but make it crayon-stroke simple. It’s tough to refuse the clean potential of a house, with all those precise lines & box-shaped lenses waiting. But remember while you’re building that anyone can find this door. That everyone is free to wander these rooms.

Sweep up everything that’s chaotic and hold it close. Closer. No…that isn’t close enough, hold it even closer than that. Think maybe the space between heart and stomach is perfect. Hold it there with the tremble of your stilled diaphragm.

Sheathe your pen.

Anticipate your summons to a midnight courtroom. Find yourself idling there when you cannot spare the sleep. Be afraid to move like your bed is a raft & the floorboards too restless for disruption. Count your breaths.

Turn onto your back anyway. Cup a hand over some patch of your skin, let it anchor you.

Stare down the coming dawn and feel the struggle, a restlessness trapped in some surface vein. Close your eyes. Bite your lip but only if you need to taste your own blood & wish all of it would just fucking drown already.


	4. i would never

the things i would never write down:

1\. How he watched my tongue leave my mouth, followed the way it blanketed my spoon. His gaze was so deft, its touch so light. Buoyed by a fluttering, it was hesitant enough to trick the perimeter of my perception yet worldly enough to know how to anticipate my mouth’s next move. The way I thought eating & eating would stave it off. Instead he put on the kind of smile that hovers half in and half out of reality and let his eyes get darker.

2\. How I steered the conversation, or failed to. I started to sweat and blamed it on the blaring vents, my brakes getting soft so I smiled my way around a wheel with too much play & seduced myself with my own considerable intelligence. Those flashy words dazzling until I forgot—or is it sidestepped, leapfrogged, ditched—the unspoken manwoman rule of _you-never-undercut-the-deeper-voice-no-matter-how-foolish-it-sounds_ ( & this man has never had a foolish day in his life). My runaway blood thumping, a certain decorum flashing by, a strange wind happening in my chest. The way nothing could’ve prepared me for his unraveling voice, his unmoored look glinting, that slight soft tremor cupping his words: _your mind is a delight_.

3\. How my stubborn flagrant skin got hotter and hotter—all that runaway blood factors here—when there was no wine to blame.

4\. How he studied my face as if searching for a place to land.

5\. The way I couldn’t wait for his decorum to arrive. How I couldn’t stand my own stillness. The way I stood up too fast & he fell away from the back of my chair while my thin heels wrestled with the floor—all that lush carpet factors here—those damned Louboutins tricking on me, my stomach plotting its escape & my knees confused. His reanimated voice at my back. My spinning head already in the street.

6\. & then I’m on that street, its wet pavement and soaked stones, its soaked branches still bare, the sky a basketful of wet white sheets dripping, the traffic a grating rush of harried wet wheels. My hair gathering mist. When our footfalls just about synced up, within touching distance of my car, a wind swooped down loaded with cold & body-slammed me. I can’t see it, my back is turned, but his mind is doing some wrong math: _flushed face + a dulling of attention + soft body on rickety feet = illness_.

7\. The fragile smile I dredged up, protested with. My pulse clamoring at the way he ignored me.

8\. I’ll suppose later on that it came natural. He has children, after all. I’m barren, so looking up I wouldn’t know the difference between a father’s unconscious gesture and an excuse. My heart pounding, he found my eyes snared in a methodical stripping, the precision of it, all the languor of leather peeling off his fingers. I wanted to swallow but lost my way. My lips unconscious. My mouth filled to the brim with slinking spit. He’s older, but he’s not old enough to be my father.

9\. His palm went to my forehead. I don’t remember blinking & I couldn’t follow the seconds so I held my breath. His palm was softer than I thought it would be but isn’t shy; it expected me to hold up its full weight. My body arrested. His warm fingertips. Goosebumps started at my feet, the backs of my ankles, and they didn’t come hard or cold or sharp; it was gooseflesh in a dreamy swarm, up my skin like a whisper. It unlaced my jaw & cradled its slow sag, tickled my earlobes on the way by, woke up my lips. It hauled a thickening heat all the way up to my chest. My breath ambitious. My nipples getting stiff.

10\. I blushed. Didn’t look away.

11\. & come on now that brief bump of knuckles—their skip across the flank of my cheek & their quick bounce to the other side—was so extra


	5. dear sir (after the peace lilies)

Dear Sir,

  
I don’t know if you know, by which I mean it’s not clear to me how you think about this, or if you even think about it at all, but—

FACEPALM

Oh FFS.

Let me start over. Ahem.

I never ate lunch with you again. I don’t count that time ten of us went back to the same restaurant & all crammed into a row of tables instead of using the too-small stuffy event room like their front-of-house manager wanted.

(& by the way I caught you glancing at the peace lilies)

I know you know this already but let me explain how there was no day following that gray noontime with the cold wind, the rain falling in my eyes & your fingers running a phantom fever out of my cheeks. How I blinked, not wanting to disturb your muttering. Maybe if I had been less stunned. Perhaps if you’re fired a warning shot.

I’m no Captain Courageous either. Startled out of movement, lax & soft on the inside, I watched the corners of your mouth lean into whatever wrestling match, careful dissection, or complicity ticked away behind your eyes. It felt like you were counting fractions of degrees. Puzzling them out. Waiting.

A truth is that I never again entered any place with you that was not public, that was not populated. There’s more than one truth tho & I know not many humans know the truth of that truth more than you. And because you’re you—when I got lazy—you applied diligence, sought to overturn that truth. I can’t remember how long it took.

Oh Lordy but that is such a lie. A week to the hour and there you were. Such decorum & all the professionalism. Look at you so chained to duty, a calendar wheel clicking. Precise. Tick-tock-tick.

Now both of my hands are sweating. This is enough to make it so. The action of pen on paper so busy & making things real. Just this, one hand writing. You’ve got my palms all wet.

So what I did was this: I conjured up an excuse. That was some real magic, too. It may have looked smooth and easy but so much effort went building up the glide of that narrative & to this day I’m like…well maybe I fooled you, maybe I didn’t.

Shrug.

I placed it on my mother and father exactly because of how high you hold the significance of family. Without shame I capitalized on that sense of holiness. I brought my nieces and nephews into it because you have children, more than one or two or three of them, and tapping the mental image of a kid-crowd—a gaggle with all that giggling—would change the direction of your weather.

I took such care.

Performed much meticulousness.

It worked.

* * *

SINCERELY YOURS

                    f. j. b.


	6. a crowded sidewalk w/no coat

In a drizzle, the deep blue, smoke & dazzle of one night. Walking a crowded sidewalk w/no coat. Shivering.

Yes, here I am in your mind’s eye, putting on a tremble. In the wet of a Manhattan spring. Slipping through its charcoal dark.

I’ll make it easier: imagine five feet eleven inches of dune-skinned mommi longlegs, slim as a fleeting thought. Prop her toe-walking with three inches of stiletto heel. Give her a pair of teacup titties, a pile of black serpentine hair; she’s got a face you wanna call Princess Jasmine but don’t dare to because age has sharpened her bones & her long black eyes are brimming with nightshade

(& also because you’re not that kind of racist)

Her nose goes back and forth between a temple and an indictment. The shape of her mouth looks like it wants to cut you.

It’s my own fault for swallowing an urge to say no. For wearing a rain-blossom dress that was all silk & bruise colors, a wisp of startled fuchsia, a plum veil sewn with tiny glittering flecks of dew. For skipping the stockings—I hate the way they’re always squirming around my thighs, waiting to be fussed with. For thinking bare shoulders & loose hair were adornment enough.

In the street. Finding a way through all these people, struggling for balance.

I’m out. This is a date. The man & who he thinks he is doesn’t matter. This sidewalk—except as a coordinate, a place to drop anchor & ride out a coming narrative—doesn’t matter.

Here is what’s true: I allowed a man who was not worth my time to haul me out of my stomping grounds & leash me with jewels. He paraded me around, churned up conversations, asked everyone with his eyes: look at this, isn’t she an exotic thing? She is, isn’t she, with her thoroughbred spine and legs that know exactly how to find the right arrogant rhythm. Her neck hints at its elegant shape, buried beneath a sheaf of hair that’s untamed and ready for lifting.

Kiss it or snap it. Either way, the neck is fragile. Don’t worry, though: those harem eyes more than make up for that dagger mouth.

(& BTW this is the guy who said that thing about waterboarding)

He drew this attention, addressed himself to a ring of smiling old man mouths & I have never felt more like an object—Exhibit A, Woman as Useful Art—in my entire life.

 _Look at her_ , he said. _Isn’t she beautiful?_

(& BTW this is the night he made a torture joke about my cunt—on the way here, trapped in the uncertain dark of his car)

My breath smashed and bleeding. My heart cut loose, knocking around inside my ribs. I held it in, caged it with pleasantries. Nodded. Shook a thousand too-soft hands.

This man ignored the furious heat in my face, steered me instead & stunned into the shape of a floating corpse—even though I knew better—I floated in his wake. His body plowing the crowd, his voice seeding the murmur & laugh of it. My feet slid along behind, my hips lost, my ankles pleading for a stable floor. I wrapped my knuckles in the sheer of my skirt. I locked down the corners of my mouth; the edges of my nostrils trembled because having to bite down on your own shame—forcing it to quietly & gently hold a stress position—will bleed the pride out of any woman’s spine.

& then

with disoriented skin clasped to a deliberate dimness, lost in smooth gold-floored ambiance & fighting off the fake firelight with my eyes, I glanced higher than my hands and—well.

You don’t miss six-foot-eight of someone.


	7. white knighting

My date circled me. He wedged himself between my exposed skin and the wandering gazes of others.

I watered down my glare. I struggled for my smallest & coldest smile. “Take your hand off me.”

Ringed by a cluster of bespoke bodies & just to my left, there’s one crisp black suit like a map spelling out the way home. Unfettered posture. Blazing white shirt that looked like silk but probably wasn’t. Hair patted down into a natural obedience. Mid-word, big veined hands settle into a demonstration of parameters. Nape-skin razored to a gleam.

I turned my head. My gaze slid up his dusk-blue tie, found a throat hard at work & I turned my back, moved away. The notes of a woman’s political anecdote scintillated through the rhythms of his laughter, torn up & cradled by it at the same time. My shoulder-skin shivered. Waves of ambient noise swelled up beneath the way he told a familiar story. No one breathed—including me. That folksy charm the tenderest of performances. His laughter hair-trigger. The animated nasal in his voice a homespun sonnet.

My date tilted his face into my hair & murmured. He freighted his tone with slick concern. His hot & sticky palm would not part with my naked back.

“Are you all right?”

His tobacco-scented puff of breath, the whiskey still in his mouth, made my skin twitch. I leaned away and his hand lifted, curled a finger. He stroked the underside of my elbow. My stomach spasmed.

I swallowed an acidic pang, attempted to corral his gaze with my own.

“I said that I want you to take your hand off me.”

But this man I was with, the date. Jonathan. This petty irritant. Jon. This overstyled & silvering Ken doll. This clunky accessory.

No matter how I opened it, my feminine mouth turned words into noise. I looked at his face, watched it happen; I’d say something & it would hit his ears, an industrious brain whirring up to a passable speed to edit out the parts he didn’t like. To translate emotive words into things that would not be his fault. To slot them into a hysteria map, a context of its own design. Whenever I spoke, Jon’s attention flew off through the noise. Every time. It galloped from head to head, his face cramping, his mouth slanted in a way that wanted to be handsome, that could be, if low-hanging cruelty is what gets you wet.

“Hey.” I put myself between his erratic glances and the nearest exit. “Would you look at me?”

He threw back his neck, rolled his shoulders. That masculine dance a throwing-off. He glanced skyward. He moved his feet apart & then he looked at me, tilted his head down, touched his chin. Like he was solving me. He shook his head and snorted, his fleeting half-smile like a wrung-out rag.

My cheeks threatened heat. “What’s that look for?” I tightened the fold of my arms. “Was I not clear enough for you?”

He wrapped his indifference in innocence. His arms swung & he rolled his spine around. His gaze touched the corners of the room, lingered on red light. His mouth wouldn’t settle.

 _Exit signs_.

That was the moment I knew: _it’s my height, he can’t deal with it—all six foot two of me & my gendered shoes, attached to his presence but refusing to—what? Flatter him. Be enticing. Behave_.

It was just a pair of inches, but still. Sometimes that’s all it takes to make a pair of testicles cower.

He fidgeted.

“Seriously?” My lips wanted to twitch their way toward a sneer but I drew in a weight of breath & used it to calm my face. “You’re just going to…what?” I arched an eyebrow. “Pretend I’m not talking? How long do you think you can get away with that?”

Florid color happened in his cheeks. “You want some air?” He blinked, fixed a magnanimous smile over his animal mouth. He turned, the gesture smooth as choreography. “Because we can do that.” The words fell out of him like drops of sugar meant to soothe the sulk out of a overwrought child. He looked at me, strove toward his most endearing expression. He put fragility in his words. “If that’s what you want.”

My muscles turned into bowstrings. My spine crackled & my ankles wavered & I itched to slap him, but I couldn’t decide if the impact belonged on hand or cheek, if the hard thrust of a swing would burn off my restless rage, if any of this was worth staging that kind of drama.

My fingers curled. My eyes burned. Heat filled my chest. I breathed hard, stared him down.

“Farrah?”

The sound of my own name plunged through my guts. Breath slipped out my nostrils. My spine lifted, shoulders shaking down into a square. I inhaled & the bared parts of my skin wailed. My neck went limp. Some fervent part of me—the tension in my hands, the air in my throat, the clutch of my knees—burned for modesty. The roots of my hair steamed. My blink lasted too long. My feet shifted & my sense of flesh, the weight of me draped over bones, snapped out of its doze. My fingers got twitchy. The fall of my hair nudged my bare shoulders. I wanted reach back, touch beneath my hair. I tangled my fingers together instead.

I turned.

Director Comey held two flutes of champagne & they were the tall kind, shaped like trumpets or long effervescent lotus buds. I inhaled, opened my mouth. He caught me looking and his smile came. It fractured the stern in his face. “Hello.”

My face went soft. “Hi.”

He held up a flute. I glanced at where his fingers gripped the narrowed base. He grinned. “You want one?”

“Yes,” I half-murmured, stepped closer. I reached for it. “Thank you, sir.”

In the haze of my peripheral vision I saw Jon’s chest lift, his mouth do a tight-cornered twitch thing. I tilted my head down. Jon stepped forward and shoved out a hand. I took my first sip. He coughed a little, raised his voice to introduce himself. I rolled my eyes. He unsheathed a smile, his eyes pouring on the sparkle.

Director Comey shifted his flute from hand to the other. He downshifted his smile, half-turned. He let a handshake happen.

Jon’s throat flushed. He did his best to grip but those long rawboned fingers swallowed his hand whole. I glanced up & watched something hard in his face, a haughty flickering shadow, come and go.

Director Comey lifted his chin. He changed the angle of his face, took back his hand. The set of his shoulders tranquil. His expression bemused. He returned the flute to his right hand, slanted his smile.

The aftermath twitched in my date’s cheeks.

The clink and crackle of voices. Rustling breath. The sound of the room soft, like waves are.

I glanced back and forth between them.

Both men nodded & flashed narrow smiles, as if it was the thing to do. Both men lifted their chins, stacked an extra breath of space between them.

Jon dropped his weighty gaze on me. My skin revolted. For a bare second it pushed on my lungs.

Though some genial affability remained in Director Comey’s face & a half-smile cradled his mouth, a tiny muscle fluttered underneath his jaw. His free hand twitched. A ghost shiver galloped up my spine. Jon blinked. His eyes became feverish in their search for anything that wasn’t me. His face shifted, acquired a careful blankness. My cheeks burned. For a handful of seconds, he almost looked lost. I curled an arm around my waist, dunked my unruly mouth in a long sip. I lowered my eyes.

Director Comey’s—Jim’s—voice hit a gravelly, coddling pitch. “You didn’t say you were going to be here.” His eyebrows went up. “Did you?”

I shook my head. “No.” I looked up at him, tipped my glass up for another drink. “I don’t think so.”

He studied my face. “That’s a real shame.”

I blushed a little & lowered my voice. “It was a last-minute decision.” I lifted my glass. “I wasn’t going to.” I took a long sip of champagne. “But in the end I decided that any desire on my part to do some good in the world ought to be enough to overcome my trepidation.”

“I hear that.” He smiled, saluted with the glass. “I’m glad you’re here.” He took a sip. His smile warmed. “It’s always nice at these things to have a familiar face around.”

Jon turned sideways, cupped my elbow. I shot his fingers a icy glance.

“Where’s your wife?” I looked around. “I would’ve thought she’d be here too.”

“Oh she would normally, she was supposed to be.” Jim shook his head, clicked his tongue. “But she came down with strep throat at the last minute. She got the antibiotics and all, but it’s only been twelve hours or so. The doc says she’s still contagious.” His smile turned wry. “So tonight was a no-go and she wasn’t happy about it, either.”

“I bet.” I held my waist. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.” I moved my feet closer together, glanced into my glass. “You tell her that I hope she feels better soon.”

“Yeah.” He chuckled. “I will do that.”

“Farrah.” Jon cleared his throat.

I turned. “Yes?”

“Would you…” Jon’s eyes flicked up over my head. “Excuse me?”

“I don’t think you need me to do that, but…” I looked him over, mustered up my most dazzling smile. “OK.”

“That champagne looks pretty great.” Jon kept his voice smooth while his smile remained thin & tight. He shrugged. “I mean, what else can I say?”

“Well,” Jim sighed, lifting the glass to his mouth. He sounded tired. He shrugged a shoulder, lifted his eyebrows. “You could find your manners and apologize.”

The ease of delivery, its casual brazenness, riveted me. My ankles locked while my lungs waited, my heart threatening a beatdown a tantrum a seizure before allowing the rest of my blood access to all the benefits of a deep breath.

“Oh?” Jon blinked. “Really?” He folded his arms. “I’m not s—” He shook his head, watched Jim’s face. His brow creased. His voice compressing toward a hiss. “For what, exactly?”

“Now, son. If I have to spell this out for you, you’re gonna have to forgive me while I stand here and mourn for the state of your upbringing.”

I touched my face, slid a palm down over it. I smothered my waiting smile.

“I’m not sure what you’re insinuating, sir.” Jon’s voice whipped raw & bleeding. The wince building up in his breath. I turned my back. My mouth tremored its way around the urge to laugh. “Maybe you should spell it out.”

“Well maybe your father should’ve spelled it out for you.” Jim’s voice, crystal clear & underlined with a whetstone scrape. “Though it’s pretty clear he didn’t.”

“The champagne is pretty great.” I turned around, cleared my throat. “It’s nice and co—”

“Were you listening in on our conversation?”

“When a lady tells you to take your hands off her body, you need to knock it off.”

“It’s nice and cold.” I strengthened my voice. “Really.” I lifted my chin, sugared my tone. “You should go get some.”

“Yeah.” Jon’s cheeks flared pink. His mouth trembled. He made his voice gruff, shot me a sallow look. “I should.”

“Yeah.” My nostrils flared. “You really should.”

Jon shot his cuffs & lifted his head, made his neck regal. He tugged down the front of his coat. He stalked off toward one of those red exit signs and I watched him drag his bristling attitude off into a crowd.

Jim coughed a lingering husk out of his voice. “How are you feeling tonight, Farrah?”

I turned my back on Jonathan’s stiff-legged flounce. I held my glass close to my chest. I took a drink. I softened my voice. I didn’t look at his face. “Thank you, sir.”

“It’s nothing he didn’t earn, and you don’t have to do that.” He shook his head, waved a hand. “The…whole sir thing, I mean.” His grin simmered down into a half-smile. “It’s not like we’re on the clock.”

“It’s just…” The air felt thick, soft. My perfume broke down, mingled with the dregs of everyone else’s. The room was too warm but in a nice way, like a summer night. I touched the base of my throat. “Habit, I guess.” I sighed it out. “Habits are hard to kill.”

“I don’t want to be sir unless someone’s paying me for it, and believe me.” He chuckled. “No one’s paying me for this.”

“OK…fine.” I laughed, tossed back my hair. I looked up. “And logic wins the day.” I giggled. “Again.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” His face flushed. He knocked back the rest of his champagne. “I think using a word like logic is making it a whole lot fancier than it is.”

“Well…” I tilted my head. “Okay.” I worked to keep my smile just this side of demure. I kept my eyes on his face, lifted the flute’s rim to my lips. I mouthed the sparkling flood. Tipped my head back. Drained it. “Maybe.”

He reached for my empty glass. “I think you mean definitely.”

“Just so you know, it wasn’t nothing.” I studied his face. I lowered my voice. “Not to me. He was—”

“Getting handsy?”

“Yeah,” I blurted. “What’s that old saying?” Heat rose up my body. I brushed the hair out of my face. I felt the climb, how it sparked my shoulders and neck and face into a hot bloom. “Roman hands and Russian fingers?”

“That’s the one.” He shook his head. “Look…I apologize for eavesdropping.” He leaned in & his voice dropped. “I don’t want you to think that was my intention, I respect your privacy, I just—”

“Overheard me?”

“You sounded angry.” He turned to place the empty glasses on a passing tray. His voice blew through the words, soft and raw. “It…” He paused. “Got my attention.”

“Well.” I smelled skin-warmed wool, smoked honey, resin, hot champagne breath, a hint of pine. I let out a slow breath. I rocked out of my stillness and into a slow half-step back. “I’m thankful it got someone’s.” My scalp felt hot. “I guess I’m…” I cleared the weakening out of my throat. “Sorry it it had to be yours.”

“Why?”

“It’s…” I looked down & hair tickled my hot cheeks. I blew out a breath. I smoothed the front of my dress. “Not a position you should’ve been in.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

I lifted my face, slid my fingers through the crown of my hair. I looked in his eyes. I gathered my hair back. I didn’t look away. “It means that I’m sorry you had to see it.”

He glanced at the line of my throat. “I’m not.”

“Regardless.” I struggled to control my breath. I dropped my eyes, slid my hands over my forearms. “Thanking you is the appropriate thing to do, so…” I glanced up. “Thank you.”

“It didn’t seem kosher, so…” He held his breath, blew it out. He searched my face. He shrugged, smiled a little. “I was glad to do it.”

“Anyway I should—I should go.” My skin prickled with heat-shimmer. “I should find the spanked puppy, since it is the polite thing to do.” Blood pounded in my face. “Even if he’s rude and doesn’t seem to comprehend the word _no_ very well.” I licked my lips, glanced around. “But it was nice to see you, though.” I smiled. “I guess I should pay closer attention next time, I mean…” I smoothed the back of my hair. “I honestly didn’t know that you were going to be here.” My laugh was a ragged one. “I think I might’ve looked forward to it more if I’d known.”

“Wait.” He touched my elbow. “Wait a second, if you would.”

I flinched, rocked my weight out of its beginning step. I half-turned. “What?”

“Farrah, can we talk?”

“Yeah…yeah, of course.” I came closer. “What is it?” I kept my eyes on his face. “Is there something wrong?”

“Well…I don’t know.” He let out an abrupt chuckle. “I mean, you’re gonna have to tell me.”

I blinked. “OK?”

“Are you…” His smile turned unsteady. “Have you been avoiding me?” He exhaled, knitted his brows. “I mean, I’ve been trying to reschedule a lunch date with you for…what? Six weeks now?” His shook his head. “I understand that you have a private life and it really should take precedence when it can,” he swept the air with one hand, “you know I have very strong feelings about that, but—”

My mouth stammered around the shape of the word _what_ , failed to give it voice. “Is…is there…do you need me for something? Are you looking for a meeting, because…” I looked down & caught my hands in the middle of their drift, watched them hover over his forearms. “Um.” I blinked. “Of course, I can move whatever I need to around for that.” I dropped my arms. My heart pounded. “Because all you have to do is say so.”

“No—it’s not about that.” He sighed. “I don’t wanna even ask this, but…” His voice broke. “Do you feel I’ve been inappropriate with you?”

“No, of course not!”

“Farrah, I’m—”

“Sir, I’m sorry.” All I could think about was pulling this ballroom off me & leaving it behind. My breath disoriented. “I’m sorry. I…I need to go.”

“Of course.” He nodded & blinked, resumed an upright posture. With one hand, he patted his lapels. “I understand.”

I thought it but I didn’t dare say it: _come with me_.

Childish. The wish of a girl.

I negotiated a knot of rich people, thought about Jonathan’s exit signs. Their smarmy glow. How he must’ve counted them all night & plotted. Or maybe he just couldn’t breathe without escape holes. Or maybe he needed to know how to find the street again, to hold that knowledge. Use it to imagine certain things like…well. Dragging me out with him into the dark. Shoving me up against concrete. Making out on that wall. Score a quick fingerbang in a parking garage. He is, after all, the kind of guy who translates a string of turndowns into _wahoo that crazy bitch is a goddamn firecracker_.

I wouldn’t look for him. I refused his presence, tuned out any voice related to the sound of his. I craved a mouthful of half-frozen air. I craved what motion I could trick my legs into providing.

My thighs were slow, dazed into languor.

But my feet…well. The word that goes here is _competent_.


	8. you're so hot right now

In a drizzle, the deep blue.

In the wet of a Manhattan spring.

I stepped onto the sidewalk & night came at me like a feral mother: with soft rainsong to banish city noise & haze-ridden fairy rings draped around all the lights, her stern cold rushed me, summoned up from deep currents that never kiss the sun.

I drifted into space left behind by the footsteps of others. The firm flat of her wind caressed my face, whispered a brisk promise of extinguished fevers.

So I walked

& the upward slam, the concussion between shoe & pavement, was nothing more than gravity’s clapback. At first. Trust me when I say that no one’s blood ever needed more shade. No pair of feet begged so hard for the planet’s hard tethering. Each step was a blunt-force reminder of how I needed to nest all the way back down into my flesh, to hide there.

& I chased that beatdown. Like a penitent. A shiver was a blessing. At first.

Then…my teeth went and built themselves up a chatter. Nothing cute, no delicate little child’s vibration. I had left too much skin out. That feral wind—gone crazy with mothering—tried to rub the life back into me. She made short order of my blush-generated blanket & left my body to the erratic dance of muscles that were just trying to get warm. I’d put a whole city block between me & that ballroom when the song of my teeth made so much noise it was like a monsoon roared loose in my head.

My phone rang. I turned its rectangle of light upward.

I thought… _JFC Jonathan_.

I thought _so this is what the digital-age tantrum looks like & just how that entitlement comes home to roost: one bright screen buzzing like a hornet & the thrust of a demand emasculated by the opening notes of_ Death and the Maiden. _He’ll get all up in my twitter feed when this, texts, e-mails, & facebook messages don’t work_.

I thought _might shoulda just stayed home & written this one off—but don’t think too much about that right now or you might cry_

I thought _for fuck’s sake Farrah hail a cab & get yourself inside before the mother in your head accuses you of fishing for the flu_

The buzzing stopped. My feet—their bones numbed and just beginning to ache—lost their way. I gripped my phone, sheltered my eyes from quickening rain. I searched for an awning.

A new buzzing jolted me out of my task. I looked down. My fingers split the glow & soaked up the heat. I steered myself into the space beneath a narrow overhang, doused myself in jaundiced & plum-stained neon light. The bulbs made shadows with themselves, interlaced them before throwing them across my skin. They draped a stippled gray ghost light, a raindrop-woven lace, over my upper arms. This light crawled down my face. I propped my shoulder blades with wet brick. The phone had stopped its singing but I unlocked it anyway. I used a shaking fingertip.

I returned the call. Put the back of my head against the building’s stone-cold flank. Closed my eyes. One ear gave me ringing & the other a bunch of traffic noise. The hot screen cupped my cheek.

“Farrah?”

“Yes.” I opened my eyes. I watched the street. “It’s me.”

“Did you leave?”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “I did. I didn’t really bother with Jonathan, I mean I was going to…but.” I shrugged. “I guess I just don’t care enough.” I laughed. “Not that I’m feeling like I should. I don’t.”

“You sound like you’re cold.”

“I am.”

“So…you’re not—OK, I thought—” Jim flooded the smooth hard silence with a rough sigh & his voice guttered, a slight vulnerability flickering in the bottom of his breath. “Where are you?”

My voice thinned out, went high & soft. “Under someone’s canopy.” A heat shiver tingled my skin. “I’m on foot.” I leaned past a rail, a cement-potted cedar. “About a block away.” Rain dropped off a canopy and landed on my lips. “I just needed to…” The hydrocarbon tang stunned my tongue. “I dunno.” I shook my head. “Walk it off, I guess.”

“Where are you staying?” He paused. “I mean, I’d…may I…” He cleared his throat. “Would you like me to drive you?”

“Yeah.” The word shuddered on the thrust of my chilled lungs. “I would.”

“Tell me where you are.”

I left my shelter, went to the edge of the sidewalk. Rain blew against the small of my back. I shielded my eyes, read the street names aloud. He told them back to me, voice all brusque & preoccupied with navigation. I affirmed, skittered back under the overhang. My heels scratched on the damp asphalt. I grit my teeth & a ghost-shiver grabbed my spine, shook it until the inside of me rattled. I plugged my other ear. “Are you in your personal vehicle?”

“Yes.”

“OK.”

“Stay there, Farrah.”

“Yes, sir.” I fought my jaw’s urge to clatter. “I will.”

He broke the connection.

The light of my phone screen dimmed & I took it off my face. I studied the overhang’s scalloped edge. Rain hung there, a row of disjointed crystals.

My eyes went to the street. The thin dark with its mist sifting down, the darting lights thrown wild by water, and the slick blur of rolling wheels led my sight down dead end trajectories. My teeth knocked crowns. When I spotted the slowed glide of a familiar vehicle shape I hustled out of the soaked shade, dodged human motion on my way to the traffic’s edge. My breath made spurting clouds.

I flinched back & took a step, my recollection dizzied by crowds of cars. My ears pulsed. Drops of water fattened on my bare skin. A passing car scattered water over my ankles, saturated my thin & delicate hems. I hugged my own arms.

A roaming pack of bodies jostled behind me & some passing-by dude thickened his voice with honeyed lechery & whistled. He tossed out offers to warm me up. I ignored him. Other dudes made jittery shadows on the sidewalk & laughed, a wisecrack chorus sharing the almost-fire smoldering in their lungs. I didn’t look.

A big dark-hued SUV skimmed the curb, rocked to a gentle stop.

I shook wet hair out of my face. I groped for the hang of my purse. I jammed my phone down into its open mouth.

One tinted window hummed down. “Jesus, Farrah.” Another horn blasted at close range. I fastened my purse & glanced up, saw Jim lean across the seat. He yanked the doorhandle. “You’re shivering like the little match girl.” He shoved the door open. “Get in.”

I pulled the door & squirmed around its edge, tucked myself through that gap. The horn came again, long & strident. I hastened my backside into the front seat. “Mmmm, you preheated.” I shut the door, tossed my purse onto the floor. I shifted my thighs against the warm seat. “Thank you.”

The window slid up, sealed itself shut. The street noise dulled.

“Buckle up, please.”

“Yep.” I straightened, clicked the belt into place. “Of course.”

He nudged the SUV back into traffic. His palms rested on the wheel’s bottom arc. His eyes crawled up the line of cars. “Little colder out tonight than you thought?”

“More like a little wetter.” I wiped droplets off my forearms. “Cold is just cold until you add wet and then it just—goes straight into your bones.”

His right hand unhooked from the wheel, fingered a knob. He turned it. The vents roared.

“No, don’t sweat yourself out for me.” I eased off my shoes. I pulled one foot into my lap & sandwiched chilly toes between my palms. “You can turn that down.”

The SUV picked up speed. “I’ll be fine.”

Hot air blew into my face. I rubbed my foot until my fingers got cold. We darted through an intersection & I looked at him. I watched how faint blue dashlight saturated his shirt collar, a gush of traffic light drowning it out before rushing past; it slung its white-hot glow & pirouetted shadows, chased them out the windows.

He stared straight ahead.

The angles in his face were scoured-down but still sharp. The faint color came back, purpled a thin flush in his cheekbones. It glinted on his scatter of silver hairs.

Even his blink was slow & methodical.

A restlessness blew through me. It nosed at the deep currents of my blood, taunted lymph with warmth. My ribcage forgot itself. I turned my attention out the windshield, watched first-floor faces glide by, darkened storefronts. Brickwork & glass. Arguing light. The bodies of pedestrians just a tangle of aimless legs.

A new heat started in my cheeks. My sinuses tingled & I hugged my arms, held a breath in for too long. My belly folded up, trembled. My heart clamored.

The wipers thumped out a lazy rhythm.

His fingers creaked against wheel-leather. I heard him rustle in the seat before his words came out low & soft, laced with too much calm. “Where are you staying?”

I gave him the name of my hotel.

It smacked the calm out of his voice. “Did you really think you were gonna walk that far?”

“No.” I closed my eyes. My disoriented skin built up a humming drift out of forward motion. My voice softened. “I didn’t.” Dreamy heat cupped the big muscles of my thighs, eased apart their trembling knots. My eyes opened to sheets of rain.. The wipers gathered them up, the wind fanning water out into wavering streams. “I’d planned to take a taxi.”

“Well then why didn’t you?”

My head and shoulders overheated. “You called me.” Adrenaline wafted up the back of my throat & I sliced it out of my stirred-up breath, used the most precise tone I could muster. I measured out each word. “Then I called you back.”

“I’m…” He bounced a palm on the wheel. “I’m having a hard time, Farrah.”

I turned my head.

“I just want you to know that.” His fingers flexed, wrapped themselves around the steering wheel. “I’m having a real hard time right now, I mean…” His voice hardened, went brittle at the leading edge. “Look.” He glanced at me. “I don’t want to patronize you, or just…talk at you like you’re some kind of little girl, but I will have you know I find that very tough when I see that you’ve gone and run out into a winter rain without a coat only to end up shivering on a street corner like some kinda…” He frowned & his nostrils flared. He backhanded air. “I dunno, drowned rat.”

My eyes stung. I blinked, took a shaky breath. “Wow…you, uh.” I licked my lips. “Make it sound like I need to go into the woodshed or something.”

“I know I shouldn’t feel like that, but—”

I blinked several times. My eyes dodged the wipers, darted all over the onrushing street. I held my breath. I glanced at him.

His face-flush darkened. His fingers tightened their grip.

“Like what?”

His breathing went out of rhythm. His face froze, hot pink creeping down jaw & neck.

“You think I’m…” My whole body buried itself with a flash of heat. “In need of…discipline?”

His mouth jerked around a quick exhale. He tried to organize his breath & it led his voice toward a weak, graveled-up place. His eyelashes fluttered. “I really wish you wouldn’t say it like that.”

“Like what?” I tried to control my breath. “How would you say it, then?”

“I wouldn’t.”

His unsettled face—with its wild eyes & too-hot skin, the fracture in his cheeks, the rough weather happening in his mouth—mesmerized me. “It sounds like you feel like I need a good spanking, even if it’s just a metaphor.” I wrangled my breath. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“No…I-I don’t think so.” He gripped and re-gripped the wheel. “I don’t feel like that’s what I’m saying at all.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“It’s…that’s…t-that’s not…I’m just—” He cut himself off with a sharp sigh, pursed his mouth. “This conversation is not—”

I twitched an eyebrow. “Appropriate?”

“No!” Vehemence undercut his tone & roughed up the words. “It is absolutely not.”

I cracked the window & cold rushed in, swollen with a jangle of traffic noise. “Then what are we talking about here, Jim?”

“That I…” He grimaced. “Well, what we’re talking about is that I have—I guess that—I-I have no right to feel that way.” The words tripped over themselves on the way out, shaking & trying to soothe their own broken places. “It’s not a correct way for me to feel.”

“To feel what way?”

“That I have any right t-to…well, to manage your well-being or attempt in any way to look after you.” He made a frustrated noise. His hand lunged at the dash, twisted the heat down. “That’s not my job.”

“But you do it anyway,” I half-whispered.

“Yes.” It came out a soft half-snarl, a velvet gush of breath. His voice husky.

Slow gooseflesh stirred over my spine. I blinked, my body stunned. Breath puffed out of me in jigs and jags, my tongue dry. My heart rhythm went off the rails & I pulled in calming breaths that piled too much oxygen in my blood. A hot prickling flooded the roots of my hair. My thighs leaned in, knees nuzzling up tight against one another. I bit my lip. My belly throbbed like a drum. I gathered up my skirt, gripped its silk. My head adrift. My feet curled.

“Farrah?”

“Stop.” My breath unraveled. I shut my eyes. “Just—”

“Did I—”

I made fists. My half-whisper broke. “You’re so hot right now.”

He swooned out a gut-punch sound, all weak breath stammered by the clench of a restrained throat.

“I’m sorry.” I covered my face with my hands, sweat into my palms. I whipped the whimper out of my mouth. “I’m sorry.”

His lungs couldn’t hold onto air.

“I-I…” My skin wooed by fever, I got dizzy. My heart hammered. “I’m so sorry.”

He rustled his voice into a thick rasp. “Don’t.”

“Look, you can…” My teeth dug into each other & I tensed my thighs against my groin’s heavy pulse. “You can just…let me out.” My voice soft-tender, close to a plea. I caught my breath. “If you want.” I stared at the steam forming along the bottom edge of the window, swallowed at the thought of his glowering silence. “I’ll get a taxi.” My breath fidgeted. “I can just leave.” I lifted my voice just above a murmur. “I mean it…we don’t have to ever talk about this again.”

The blinker loomed loud in a ragged silence.

“I mean it,” I whispered. “I’ll just—”

“Stop.” It came out like _stahp_ , a wound still raw & packed with gravel.

My muscles—all sweetened up & riled—betrayed the stillness I worked so hard to maintain. I slid my hands up my thighs. He slowed the vehicle, turned it. Streetlights blurred over the windshield. Rain-filtered light crawled up my arms.

“Oh Jesus,” he whispered.

I tremored in hot little bursts. My eyes burned. “Your silence is humiliating.”

“And what,” he said, the thin of his voice stretched over gravel, “is the right thing to say to that?”

“You commit.” My stomach tightened. My veins choked with ice. “To something.” I bent over, snatched my purse off the floor. “You pull over and put me out of this car or you don’t.” I hugged it. My eyes filled. “I don’t think Jesus is gonna help you much.”

“Is that what you want?” A rough, startled anger entered his voice. “Do you want me to just—kick you to the curb?”

“There’s the hotel.” I wrestled open my purse. “Look.” I wiped my eyes. “You can see it from here.”

“Farrah.” He tapped the brakes. “This isn—”

“Shhhh.” I pulled out a tiny yellow post-it pad, cradled it with one palm. I clicked a pen to life. “Just shut up and let me do this.”

He sighed, made his voice quiet. “OK.”

I sniffled, scrawled a number on the pad. I pulled out my spare room key.

“Far—”

“Oh for God’s sake, Jim,” I hissed, peeling off the note & slapping it on the key’s little cardboard envelope. “Shhhh.” I tossed it onto the dash. “Can’t you just—shhhh?” I flapped both hands. “For once?”

He rolled the SUV to a stop. “Yeah,” he half-whispered.

“Do whatever you want with it.” I looped my purse around my neck. “I won’t hold it against you.” I unbuckled my seatbelt. “If you—I dunno, decide to throw it away…”

“I—”

“Shhhh.”

“OK.”

I stuffed my feet back into my shoes. “It’s gonna be like none of this ever happened.” I opened the door. “I don’t feel like that’s too much to ask.” I climbed out of the SUV. “So please respect that.”

“All right.”

I moved to shut the door & stopped. The engine rumbled. It tickled the insides of my hand. “Good night.”

He took the key off the dash. “Good night.”

I closed the door.


	9. dear farrah (3/6/17)

3/6/17  
McLean, VA

Dear Farrah,

When I entered your hotel room, it was 11:34 p.m. You had fallen asleep. Your knitting was balled up at your side. You’d left your copy of _Night Sky With Exit Wounds_ open, the pages spread out across your chest. I didn’t want to wake you.

But that isn’t the whole truth. I felt very much like I might be occupying your space without meaning to. You had left all the lights on and what I thought was—this light is yours. You’ve paid for it. This air is yours, too. Like I shouldn’t breathe too loud. That it was a sin against you to break the silence.

Though the room was warm, I didn’t take my coat off. I watched you for a short while, until I started to feel weird about it. So I put your book beside you, left your key there with a note to mark your place. I put your knitting on a nightstand. I turned off the lights.

Things I could’ve done:

1\. Actively disturbed your sleep.  
2\. Taken off my coat and my clothes and gotten into bed beside you like I owned the place.  
3\. Watched you sleep until my uneasiness sorted itself out.  
4\. It’s hard for me to think of another option, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I’ll leave this space here. You may fill it with whatever you want.

None of those things felt right. Even having that key in my hand and knowing it was an invitation to certain things didn’t change it.

It’s not because I don’t want you, though.

Consider this a confession: you in that ballroom, wearing something that wasn’t in work mode, was an experience. I’m speaking for myself, here. But what I want to say—I think—is that I didn’t know how something so simple and commonplace as a dress could happen to someone. Be an event. And I imagine you might want to ask me how, want to ask me what I mean by that; I know I would. I’d want it taken apart and laid out for me, with lots of bright light handy and a glossary of jargon to use for purposes of identification. I like to label all the parts. But that’s just me.

I’ll tell you that I don’t know the answer, if such a thing exists. I can only give you my answer.

I know you’re well-versed in the use of semiotics; it’s apparent in the way you enter a conversation. You can look at a dress like it’s a symbol. It’s one thing to imagine someone outside a certain frame, it’s just an exercise of the mind. Maybe “fantasy” is the word I’m looking for here but that word is not quite comfortable yet. I’d like to retreat into a word with a less earthy baggage, if I may. You don’t have to, of course. But I hope you will. Consider it a kindness, if you’re feeling generous enough to give it to me. What I’m saying is that one’s own imagination will always fall prey to itself but gently. It’s more like a swoon than a takedown. But the real world isn’t so kind.

It isn’t that I didn’t know you before that night as a beautiful woman. I did. Oh—believe me.

Your beauty is a ravenous kind. Please don’t take that the wrong way; it’s no fault of yours. Allow me for a moment to discuss your beauty as something separate from you, an entity with its own socially constructed will. Through all the ways in which I have been trained by the world to think of a woman’s beauty, to experience it and relate to it, it has the ability to perform actions that extend far beyond anyone lucky or unlucky enough to be born with it. Like the replication of a virus, if you want to be ugly about it. Or the functionality of one’s reputation.

Seeing you in such a beautiful dress—and I hate how insipid the word “beautiful” is, how overused it’s become, but right now my mind won’t give me the sharpness I want so please forgive me for inflicting it on you—gave my eyes a certain permission. To be honest, I didn’t entirely want it. The thing with a dress like that is how its wont to make a man think he’s got permission to not just look at all of you, but to see all of you. To take you out of work mode and position you somewhere a lot closer to the skin.

Of course I know a thing can feel true even when it isn’t. And that emotions make a fool out of everyone. I have enough sense to be ashamed of that. Even now, what I have when I think about you wearing that dress is a low feeling all mixed up with a high one. It’s just those two things, fighting each other. Making my stomach hurt.

Your beauty, it’s not shy. It’s not tamed. It doesn’t pretend to hide its face, or to put its claws away. It won’t make itself small. It won’t starve. It’ll threaten to strangle a room, but only when it’s buzzed up on the electricity of a keen wit. It’ll assault every sensibility you have, but only when it’s swollen into a natural force by strong emotion.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

I’m ashamed of that, too.

 

  
Sincerely,

JBC


	10. #comeyday

TFW you’re in a small vegan cafe by the sea & even that place as a TV—because you looked all over for the one place that doesn’t have one—& your colleague, who is almost a friend, wouldn’t dream of eating breakfast without access to CNN

 _Vegan_ :

Wherever you go, there you are.

Here in California there’s too much light. It’s white, it’s everywhere, wall-to-wall windows bring it in dump it on your head. Even the plate is white. The water outside the window overlaid in bright, a vicious yet broken trail of it pointing east. Not a single water stain offending hard acres of blue sky.

 _Your colleague_ :

Is grinning. Ass squirming against the chair. Twiddling a straw. Her tongue touches her teeth & holds for just the space of a breath. Her head’s got a tilt on, she’s even playing with her hair & flirting with an idea of justice for all her subconscious worth—worshiping a stern face, a stage direction, a lonely table, just like everyone in this room who isn’t you.

(& you’re like…just kinda watching your food, pretending)

Your ankles crossed & knees bent tight around the chilled chair, one hand floating a fork, too aware of your corralled hair. It’s far too early in the day for achy roots but there it is. Your eyes are cold, staring off. Your ears are full of slow static while you tongue the bits of kale stuck in your teeth.

 _CNN_ :

So this is your old boss, who is nothing like your new boss, colonizing this room’s artificial silence. He is all she wants to talk about even though you’re no longer a part of anything to do with THE BUREAU

“Aren’t you going to watch?”

“I’ll read the transcript.”

(& as if you ever told Jill—your colleague—that that part of your life was even a thing)


	11. scene: phone call w/stage direction (or, how to almost tell your mom the truth)

[b/c you are the camera, open your eyes]

INT. SILVER SEDAN W/ DARKENED WINDOWS

1:12 p.m. Hot sun, spinning rainbows etched into polarized glass (& you’re wearing the big dark bug-eyed shades you didn’t know you’d need until you got here & they’re polarized too, so).

Look around. Linger on all the too-clean details.

Parking lot, palm trees, silvered windows, birds of paradise, oleanders, cactus. Billboards & traffic. Light-colored pavement. Your engine running, humming up underneath your thighs & pumping out cold air. This isn’t even your car, it’s a company upgrade (& your car is still in Maryland, parked in your parents’ driveway where it probably still smells ever so faintly of tacos, the smoky jasmine perfume you used to wear, and spilled coffee).

Your lunch warm in your lap. The drink cup sweating.

This car syncs up with your phone, so all you have to do to call your mom is push a button and declare your intentions.

YOU  
Call mom.

The speakers blot out the quiet radio, make ringing noises. The line clicks open.

MOM  
[ _for the sake of this exercise, imagine the sound of your name in a soft half-jolted voice_ ]? Is that you?

You take a bite. Stuff spills out of your sandwich. You move to catch it, forget for a moment that you don’t have to hold a phone to your ear to have this conversation.

YOU  
I hope so or else my phone has gained sudden sentience. But I for one welcome our smartphone overlords.

MOM (laughing)  
What are you doing now? Are you at work?

You nod & wipe your mouth. You do it again, crumple up the napkin. This isn’t a video call, but she’s a mother which means she can hear the sound of you forgetting basic hygiene even through 2600 miles of phone line.

YOU  
I’m eating lunch.

MOM  
By yourself?

YOU  
Yeah, by myself.

MOM  
Why not with a friend? Don’t you have a friend there?

This is how she reminds you of your isolation.

It’s a conscious thing, she’s aware of what she’s doing; she takes her concern, which is genuine, and makes it into a tiny blade to flay you with. Her love is pure, but she’s a mother. This means she does not fear a little bloodletting.

YOU (sighing)  
I do have a friend, sort of. She’s more of a work friend than anything. We ate breakfast together this morning, we went to this little vegan place by the beach. Neither of us had been, so we thought to try it out.

This is how you acknowledge that distance without touching on the concept of loneliness.

There are vegan cafes in [ _for the sake of this exercise, imagine your own hometown_ ] & your mother knows they are a thing, but dropping the phrase _vegan cafe_ simultaneously frames her imagining of your morning within a certain exotic luster ( & you’re invoking the true meaning of the word _exotic_ , here—from Greek _exōtikos_ ‘foreign,’ from _exō_ ‘outside’) and positions a convenient cultural touchstone between where she is and where you are.

MOM  
(chuckling)  
You’re not vegan.

YOU  
No, but she is.

MOM  
I see, I see. Well that was rather nice of you.

YOU  
I don’t really mind it. It was an adorable little place with lots of light. It had a great view. The vegan food out here is actually kind of great.

MOM  
Lovely!

YOU  
The avocado toast was amazing but the tofu scramble needed work. Too many peppers, not enough spice. I had this matcha juice drink and of course the juice was fresh, the place has its own tiny little juice bar, so it was delicious.

Think a bit about how California is a place constantly reinventing itself & rejecting its own history but keep the smile in your voice. Dismiss any parallels between you & it that may enter your mind like your life depends on it. That dismissal, after all, is the only thing holding all the wild & crazed parts of you back.

MOM  
Did your little cafe with the beautiful views have a TV?

YOU  
Everyplace has a TV now. Even the McDonald’s has a TV.

MOM  
Did you watch any of the testimony?

She’s a mother & her aim is impeccable.

The innocence of her question strikes deep into that raw inch between your manufactured calm & the urge to screech. It’s well-made barb catches the beat of your heart while the feathery end scrawls out the rhythmic beginnings of words.

Remember to breathe.

Know in the heat of a moment that it’s better to leave it; to pull it out now is to risk a sudden flood, a strangling of your spastic cool. Hold off. There’ll be plenty of time later for self-surgery.

YOU  
(precede your reply with a short stretch of silence)  
No.

MOM  
I guess it’s so much earlier out there isn’t it? I keep forgetting.

YOU  
Yeah it’s three hours earlier, actually.

MOM  
Mr. Comey looks tired.

YOU  
(sliding it down the back of a slow breath)  
Yes.

MOM  
He’s shouldered a lot in the last few weeks.

YOU  
He has, yeah.

MOM  
I mean, working for the Trump administration had to be a total nightmare. They’re all a bunch of cheats and liars.

YOU  
(laughing)  
Yeah.

MOM  
Have you spoken to Mr. Comey?

YOU  
No.

MOM  
But you left on such good terms.

YOU  
That’s true.

MOM  
And he did write you that glowing letter of recommendation.

YOU  
He sure did, yes.

MOM  
You never doubted that he would do the right thing, did you?

YOU  
No.

MOM  
Despite all that Hail Mary business with the Hillary emails.

YOU  
You know I can’t discuss that.  
  
MOM  
You don’t work there anymore and as far as I understand it, at least from what you’ve alluded to, you’re allowed to express an opinion as a private citizen.

YOU  
You’re right, I never doubted Director Comey’s decision-making because he never gave me a reason to.

MOM  
Now I know this topic that I am about to bring up might upset you, but—

[b/c you are the camera, close your eyes]

INT. BLOOD-FILTERED LIGHT BEHIND YOUR EYELIDS.

Take a deep breath & feel your mother’s voice, how it enters you. Your body follows it the way a flower follows the sun. There’s a longing—it dozes between lungs and ribs—to throw a double handful of tears on the ice between you & watch it crack.

Put your hands on the wheel & squeeze. Pretend it’s an anchor.

YOU  
You’re gonna do it anyway, right?

MOM  
I understand that you can’t talk about why you quit the FBI, you’ve made that clear to me numerous times. Beyond numerous, and it’s to the point now where I don’t want to even try to talk to you about it anymore. But you can talk about why you decided to leave Baltimore. You can tell me why you left home.

YOU  
Mom I told you this already, it was a last-minute opportunity and I had to make a very fast decision—

MOM  
Yes but why California? Why go so far?

YOU  
Should I have stayed home, then? Moved into my childhood bedroom while waiting for a job offer to come along?

MOM  
It would’ve been lovely to have you! Your father and I love you very much. We know that leaving so abruptly must’ve been so hard on you. I know you were upset. And you are a good worker with an excellent reputation. It wouldn’t have taken very long for you to find another job.

YOU  
Your optimism is touching, Mom.

MOM  
Don’t be sassy [ _for the sake of this exercise, imagine your first & middle name sternly rendered_], it’s unbecoming.

YOU  
I’m so amused that you think being becoming is at the top of my priority list right now.

MOM  
What is, then? It’s not like I would know.

YOU  
You want to go over this old ground yet again? Why? I made my decisions.

MOM  
Are you happy?

YOU  
Is anyone?

MOM  
Of course people are happy, don’t be dramatic. You’re old enough to know that I am not talking about the happiness you see in movies. I’m talking about real life. Your real life. Are your decisions doing what you thought they would do for you? Did leaving Mr. Comey make you happy? Did leaving home make you happy?

YOU  
Mom I did not leave Director Comey, I left my job. A chicken is not a chicken dinner. They’re not the same thing.

MOM  
A chicken is not a chicken dinner? (here she laughs)

YOU  
Why is that funny?

MOM  
(still laughing & switching over to Farsi)  
Your metaphor is silly, am I not supposed to laugh?

Take a moment to admire the pure stealth of the woman who brought you into this world.

Draw in a breath, hold it.

That respect will flicker, tiny and hot and fierce & it might burn but that’s o.k. Cup a hand over the bright long enough to figure out whether or not the switchover to a language you associate with childhood will loosen you.

Then feel around for your various knots. Breathe out your sadness since they’re tight as ever. Massage them a little & find that their pain is dull, wound-like.

YOU  
(not laughing & speaking English)  
Can we not? You know my fluency is not what it used to be.

MOM  
That’s because you no longer use it. Yet I see that you understood me just fine.

YOU  
That you were making fun of my word choices? Yeah, I caught that. Also I didn’t leave home, I came here. That’s not the same thing either.

MOM  
Well, do you like it there?

YOU  
It’s not what I thought it would be.

MOM  
When is your contract up?

YOU  
Six months.

MOM  
Honey…did Mr. Comey do something?

[b/c a camera can’t feel pain & threaten to wet your cheeks]

INT. GRAY-BLUE LIGHT  
INT. SUN-BLEACHED CALI LIFE  
INT. PERSISTENT JALAPENO BLUSH  
INT. CANNED COLD-CHATTERING TEETH

Spit denials out like bullets. Your teeth will smolder & your jaws will get too hot to handle but that’s o.k. Your hands might shake & interfere with your aim but that’s o.k. too. Do not give her a chance to reload.

YOU  
No!

MOM  
Was he unkind to you in some way?

YOU  
No!

MOM  
I’ve never asked because—

YOU  
No!

MOM  
I thought you would’ve told me if it was, but—

YOU  
No!

MOM  
Sometimes I get a feeling like—

YOU  
No!

MOM  
There’s—

YOU  
No!

MOM  
For love of all that is holy will you stop interrupting me?

YOU  
No, I won’t, because it’s stupid. I can’t believe you even went there. What is wrong with you?

MOM  
[ _for the sake of this exercise, imagine the syllables of your name barked out & short_]! Nothing is wrong with me!

A well-placed reminder of who you are & there goes all your ammunition. A truth is that sometimes it takes so little to make you lose your grip.

YOU  
I need to go. My lunch break is over.

MOM  
[ _for the sake of this exercise, imagine your name all softened up & half-whispered like you’re a dangerous horse_]…

YOU  
No really, I’m done, I…I need to be done.

MOM  
Are you ever going to tell me the whole truth?

YOU  
Not today I’m not.

MOM  
I guess that’ll have to do.

You make promises to call tomorrow or the next day & your mom makes agreement noises.

You nod.

Disconnect.

Your eyes are now like stones. They’re that heavy & yet they won’t fall. They just hang their weight over the rest of your face, growing fatter and fatter, straining your eyelids, a great wall of water piling up behind. Your tear ducts wail.

Still, though, you’re a desert. Your skin can’t tell the difference between itself & all this cowering jacked-up plastic leftover Manifest Destiny land. The salt flats of your cheeks hover somewhere around 127 degrees, shrug off a scouring wind. Your mouth a death valley. The breath inside your nose shimmering.

You take the car out of park, roll up to a garbage can & think _this car will never ever smell like tacos_.

Roll down the window. A sticky oleander-scented breeze blasts out of nowhere & slaps you in the face.


	12. dear sir (after that thing in NY)

Dear Sir,

  
Before I go on you have to understand how much energy it takes, how hard I work. There’s a constant struggle in me against a deep-rooted urge to apologize. We all have it. Women, I mean. Ladies. Those of us assigned female at birth. Deep-rooted, as in bred into. Roots, as in slow hammers breaking up a foundation. Slow as in brick by brick, disintegration, a single reddened chunk at a time falling.

Let me explain, but first

(I am composing myself, here)

I have to mention that any feminism you might possess feels like an accident & it’s really such a shame because—well, all those daughters.

…aaaand there it is, hoo boy that urge to apologize. My writhing guts, a bad taste in my mouth. Like just maybe I stepped out of bounds when all that’s really happening is culture tricking me, good old Murica leading me down the fucking primrose path. We’re all so gullible that way, really.

It’s like there’s a mathematics to a person. A disgusting idea, isn’t it? As if a Christian upbringing + a nurtured inclination toward conservatism + big family + an uninterrupted marriage = more than just a demographic. Introducing cohort as key, as a cipher. I’ll own my easy capitulation, I can make the requisite disgusted sheep noises. Let me confess to all my moments of weakness.

I’M SORRY.

It’s just another reflex dressed up in truth’s clothing. Excuse me while I yank up this righteous wool & look around, blinking at the change in light. Watch me spit the words out. Look at it as ritual. I’ll cast out my good breeding & flog it into a herd of pigs. Think exorcism.

Am I a person to you?

That’s so naked so ugly written out like that. Like a blow. Blunt. It doesn’t hold a lot of room for nuance but that’s okay. I’m satisfied at the ugliness, at imagining its impact.

I want you to remember this isn’t an apology.

But when the dust clears I want you to consider the idea that maybe a woman is more than a woman. To a man like you, straddling the peak of the pyramid—cissexual white, Christian, presumably hetero—a woman is a shoulder, a mouth for filling, a birth-hole, a midlife crisis. All the consequences of her body get dropped like manna down into the discombobulated desert of your life.

But here’s the thing: all those things are tools.

& when you flip it over, there’s also this: their most popular functions are all transitory ones.

Tears dry & the shoulder is rendered separate, sent on its way. A mouth finds its way back to hunger, to thirst. The baby slides down and out. So does your fortieth or fiftieth decade & before you can flutter your eyelashes you’ve become an old man leading around your own grown-up child. A line of women, discarded hands and used-up lips stretch out behind you & that silent disappearance they’re giving you is not about perspective. Know that a well-laid root will destroy whole continents on its way down to that sweet sweet water. A seed is a world. Know that a flower gives no fucks & gambles all its meager love on the arrival of that sweet sweet fruit & that every day a seed trades all that it is for one leaf.

Deep down, past the red & black, past the white even, every man believes he’s a sun.

It’s not your fault, though. Children accept everything they are given.

& what about manna? Come on, you know that story. How God gave and gave and gave. How the exiles took and took and took. Not a granule saved, not a sticky patch allowed to lick off dirty fingers for later but the real tragedy is how a well-made miracle jumps from generation to generation and manages somehow to leave no evidence of itself.

It hurts to say this, but to a woman like me—cissexual brown, hetero, straight outta my Muslim mother & my lapsed Catholic dad—a man is a goal, a ladder, a shield. Sometimes he’s a ticket out of poverty that’s mortgaged in years then paid pound by pound in flesh & progeny—these are just the facts, man. Sometimes he’s an obstacle. When he does a great kindness, he always knows how to take the credit. Sometimes he just hangs over our heads like a sky that’s always been there but when he goes out of his way, handfuls of flower petals fling themselves out of the air.

Sometimes he’s just a petty murderer.

It doesn’t matter though because children take whatever they are given. They’re just little acceptance machines, clanking away all day and all night like taking the world’s shit is their goddamned job.

Am I a person to you?

Even though I took my tools & left your line of sight & made myself another home?

Can you even answer the question without them?

* * *

  
Abjectly* yours,

                      F. Barnes

 

 

 

 

 

  
_* & when I say abjection it’s Kristeva-style b/c my skin-boundaries are always wrestling with themselves & you have disturbed the righteous fuck out of my corporeal reality_


	13. how to get through all 2 hrs & 40 mins of the james comey hearing (I)

1\. Dodge all of Jill’s entreaties to go find a bar & use alcohol like a chisel on your threadbare inhibitions. She’s got a bong, too. You haven’t smoked weed since college. Tell her no.

2\. Go to the store on your way home & buy special bottles of wine. Choose them with care—make sure the variety you choose is not freighted w/meaning or good enough for you to want to drink again later in your life. Be brave enough to ruin this particular taste. Pick a local thing, a vineyard you couldn’t get at home w/o some work; buy three bottles. Talk to yourself as you load them & spin narratives: it’s ludicrous, I won’t drink them all, no one but a drunk sinks three bottles of wine in one night.

3\. Feel grim about the prospects of your self-control & buy a puke bucket too.

4\. Go home.

5\. To your tiny house. Your rented place, that furnished corporate domicile. Nothing about a place like this could ever be a real home. It’s utter indifference, the plastered walls stiff and white, the tiles not cold enough, its artwork vapid; it doesn’t invite comfort, doesn’t offer it. Think of it as a box for sleeping on cheap sheets, for keeping your milk cold. It’s full of decorative pretensions but it’s close to the water. Open all your windows so a sea breeze might fall in by accident. Pray for that strut, how it might drag in a dusty sugar smell of oleanders. How it might bruise the sickly sweet scent out of your neighbor’s citrus tree.

6\. Park your car. Open door. Walk in. Turn on some lights. Shed your work clothes. Slam your heels down & strip like it’s your job. In a better mood you might put on some music, might find a dance lurking in your joints. That happened a lot in your old life. In this tiny frame, in this shrunken one-note scene, you’ve got nothing to laugh about. You’re not moved. So just rip your clothes off & leave them wherever they fall: the kitchen floor, the bathroom, the bedroom. Drape them on furniture. Use them to cover any mirrors. They look like empty skins.

7\. Look in the mirror & give yourself the finger. Stick out your tongue, too. You don’t owe your prostration, your tears, your destabilized sexual arousal, or your imminent self-flagellation a comely appearance. Shake your hair down. Blow your ripest kiss. Climb into your pajamas. Try not to cry.

8\. Order a big pizza. Like huge & loaded, thick with crust, enough to eat off for the rest of the week. Do it because even though you’ve got work tomorrow it feels like you might never find the strength to leave this cell. Do it because pizza is always like the best parts of childhood in your mouth. Do it because there’s enough bread & protein & fat to soak up the alcohol. Try not to cry.

9\. Turn on TV. Make couch into nest. Spread out pizza, wine bottles. Slide puke bucket underneath coffee table. Curl onto your side. Snuggle a tissue box.

10\. Find your video. Ignore the heavy punch that lands in your gut. Forget the slither of heat lower down. Tune out the languid stretch in your womb. Choose the longest one.

11\. b/c you don’t want to miss his walk into a room or the way he leaves it, you can’t bear the thought that you might

12\. Try not to cry.

13\. Fail.


	14. dear j (8 march 2017)

8 March 2017  
Vienna, VA

Dear J

Wow—look at you go.

A handwritten letter leaves no trail. Unless of course you make a copy for yourself, via scanner or the good old fashioned labor of penmanship. & of course anything that’s turned loose in cyberspace lasts forever. & it’s basically the same for phone logs, text messages, jumbled-up fragments left on hard drives.

I figure a phone call might be the next best thing, since it shows a span of time engaged in an open line but edits out specifics. Though of course there’s still meaning to be found in a phone log. How many things cause a particular pattern of late-night calls?

It’s so lo-fi of you.

It’s also very smart.

I’m sitting in the driveway, I’ve got a notebook on the steering wheel. My driveway is surrounded by woods. Old growth, stately & leafy. In summer it’s so green you might puke. The house is surrounded, too.

I bought it when entering my second year at the FBI.

& how could I afford such a spectacular property, you ask?

My ex-husband—who made a great deal more money than I—bought me out of our Baltimore house. No fuss there, nothing to fight over in the divorce. He just wrote a check. He’s got a family all planted up in there now; he’s filled the rooms with his 2nd wife & 4 children (& that’s why he left me, you know—I’m 100% infertile, 5 years of all the ways in which a womb-bearer can try for pregnancy & all the money you can waste on such an endeavor—not to mention the body violations & full scale of pain—only to find that you might as well try and get solid rock to grow something out of it)

ANYWAY

I fretted over that money for two years. Disabused from the idea of long-term commitment & still aching with the bruise of abandonment, I lived with my parents the first year. I put a lot of my salary away. I had no student loans b/c while my ex-husband was still my husband he paid all of them off. Despite his rather narcissistic & fanatical devotion to the idea that he’d only suffer fatherhood for own children, he was a generous man. & still is, as far as I know.

& this buyout amount—as you might imagine—it was substantial.

So here I am, writing in my driveway. It’s 6:10 a.m. In such a sylvan refuge, at that hour, the sky is a bare pewter shade gone all dusty with pink. My pavement is wet. My trees don’t quite have leaves yet.

Tales from the Vienna Woods.

The 4th thing on your list said

it’s hard for me to think of another option, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one—I’ll leave this space here & you may fill it with whatever you want

& though I’m happy that you find me beautiful (& I can be truthful—the implication that I am the only woman who has ever been this beautiful to you does things to my breath that I don’t like) I’m gonna finish your list for you instead.

4a. Split some kind of difference between the other choices. Take off your coat but leave your clothes on. Watch me for awhile but do it from a gentle perch on the opposite side of my bed. Take my copy of _Night Sky With Exit Wounds_ but flip through it before you hide a key  & your note between the leaves. Instead of taking deliberate aim toward waking me,

4b. Find a poem you like. Even just a line, or a handful of them. Decide whether or not you can love them when they’re excised out of their little text bodies. Maybe look for a whole poem, if you can’t stand the thought of such reckless surgery. Or just a line. But pick one that feels like this moment as its happening, something like

4c. “Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven – waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just enough for us to slip through.”

4d. OR

4e. “He lifts her white cotton skirt, revealing  
another hour. His hand. His hands. The syllables

inside them. O father, O foreshadow, press  
into her — as the field shreds itself

with cricket cries. Show me how ruin makes a home  
out of hip bones.”

4f. OR

4g. “Dear God, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through  
to get here.

Here. That's all I wanted to be.

I promise.”

4h. & because it’s so hard to resist the latent sound of a poem, the thrust and yearn of printed words longing to pass through your mouth and enter a physical realm—start reading. Do it in a whisper at first. Let a half-whisper build up like the rain that is still falling. Feel it drum itself up inside your chest, find its way to a proper roar.

4i. & about here is where I could drift out of sleep. After all, it’s an easy swim up though those heavy unconsciousness layers when I’m heading toward a voice that I love. I’d be nothing to exit a dream if it’s to hear words that I love ride the current of what my father would call “all that adenoidal Yonkers crap” (b/c he’s from Brooklyn born-n-raised & fancies himself an authority on all the varying contortions regional throats are capable of enacting upon the English language)

4j. My breath breaks pattern. Maybe you keep reading & maybe you don’t. But when I fantasize about this scene unfolding, you always do. (& I want you to pay attention to the fact that I don’t have a problem with that word at all—fantasy—b/c fantasies are all about pleasure & you give me pleasure)

4k. & speaking of fantasies, Jim. Speaking of pleasure.

4l. I can smell you. I think you’re close enough for that. Maybe not, perhaps I’m misjudging. Even if you aren’t as close as I want you to be, I know that by now you’re sweating. You’ve got too much blood hanging around your surface & maybe a little pulse happening but just in the blush on your cheeks. Just enough. Thanks to the rain you’ve brought in with you and my early shower there’s more than enough humidity in this room to amplify all exhalations of skin.

4m. Because of course it’s nerve-wracking to choose a course of action so far off etiquette’s primrose path—after all, you woke me & haven’t apologized. You’re still in my room even though the presence of sleep—in your circles, at least—is an automatic sort-of rejection. I hear your nerves in your voice, their pop & sizzle. I kinda like that sound, to be honest. It destabilizes my attention. I think about the book in your hands & about the hands more than the book. Do you know what you’re here for?

There.

I’ve gone & filled your #4 with half an alphabet.

Now gimme the other half.

 

love

F


	15. dear farrah (3/10/17)

3/10/17  
Washington, DC

Dear Farrah,

OK.

So this is how you want to play it.

I’m handwriting this letter on my lunch break. I’ve got the time for it. I’m at a table in a restaurant. I’m here alone because you refuse to go out with me.

You won’t go out with me, but you’ll handwrite me a setup like that and then mail it. Did you imagine me opening the envelope? Did you imagine the look on my face? I opened it in my car. I read it in the parking garage. I think I sounded the way I felt, which was like a shaken-up hive of bees. I have no idea how my face looked. I felt hot, a little sweaty.

Your writing is both elegant and excruciating. I am not telling you anything you don’t already know.

What a scenario you’ve made. That’s quite a move, leaving me to sit and stew with all those blanks. It feels as though you’re enacting a very specific revenge for my refusal to use the word “fantasy.”

OK.

Fine.

4n. Yes, I knew what I was there for. I understood your invitation, text and the subtext.

4o. I figured you’d be asleep. I gambled on it. Waiting until it had gotten late was a way for me to admit desire without having to do anything about it. Not right then, at least. Yeah—it was a setup. I chose that course of action to evade your threat, the one about how you’d never speak of any this with me again. I didn’t want that. I still don’t.

4p. I know I shouldn’t want it, but that doesn’t matter. I have already wrestled that idea and lost. I wrestled it several times, in fact. The outcome of that particular battle was a done deal long before you and I fortuitously crossed paths in a Manhattan ballroom. I was your fait accompli a long time ago. I’d already made a choice there, but I didn’t think you’d want me. Of course the wise thing to do would’ve been to just stand by and hold my silence. What can I say? When I fuck something up, I do it big.

4q. In your story—where I’ve read to you out of your book until you woke up (and done that for the express purpose of waking you up)—my thoughts won’t organize. Not like yours. On my side of things, thoughts are all happening at once. They won’t form themselves into a line. I’ve got thoughts of don’t, can’t, and shouldn’t getting shouted down by the ones that say to do it, do something, it’s time. My mind is sometimes a contradictory and noisy place. It’s better to just let all that fight it out but the downside of waiting is that time gets funny. Disorienting. It becomes a lot harder to keep track of yourself.

4r. Because right now we’re both existing inside and outside your story—and since I am here and 100% complicit, that makes this our story—I can tell you that I don’t know what you want me to do. That I’m not sure. I might hesitate because your sudden availability is disorienting. I’m not prepared for it. I’m the kind of guy who really benefits from preparation. I want all my ducks in a row. I like to have all my bases covered. Having a playbook to read from makes me calm. I guess I’m pretty square that way.

4s. How open you are to me—that sound of you in my car, gone all weak and quivering—disorients me. That you even want me for this is too new to sink in.

4t. I have my ideas. Of course I do. I’ve been daydreaming. I’ve thought about it for a long time, how something like this might go. Now you’ve made yourself clear—you want sex to happen. You’re ready. That’s the real meaning behind all of your blushing. You want my hands on you, you want my mouth on you, you want me to fuck you. Inside this story, there’s a ready bed. You’re on your back, looking up. You’re waiting for me to do things to you that will make you come.

4u. Let’s discuss kissing. It’s the first thing most people want to do and it’s a hell of a gateway drug when it’s done right. I could wisecrack here and write some leering thing like “you sure as hell look like a woman who knows how to kiss properly” but it’s just projection. That’s male chauvinist noise, me falling back on a male propensity to make this all about how I want it to go. But when I think about you—when I FANTASIZE about you—you’ve always got a sophisticated mouth with a tongue that knows exactly what it’s doing. Is that what you want, then? To begin like most people do, with a kiss?

4v. Maybe not. That’s such an ordinary beginning. It’s a very old-fashioned start, too. Perhaps tradition isn’t something you need to feel like…what? A woman? A participant? I could choose a place, just put a hand on your body. Like that. Rest it there. Where? Maybe you’d move around for me and guide my hand to where you want it to go. Maybe you’d just look up with your big black eyes and tell me—“Jim, I’ve got no panties on.” I’d find your waistband and slide my fingers behind it and wonder what it takes to get you wet if you don’t want to start with a kiss.

4w. My favorite passage from _Night Sky With Exit Wounds_ is on page 14: “Then, as if breathing, the sea swelled beneath us. If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once. That a woman on a sinking ship becomes a life raft—no matter how soft her skin. While I slept, he burned his last violin to keep my feet warm. He lay beside me and placed a word on the nape of my neck, where it melted into a bead of whiskey. Gold rust down my back. We had been sailing for months. Salt in our sentences. We had been sailing—but the edge of the world was nowhere in sight.” That’s the one I would’ve chosen to read aloud in your story. In  our story.

4x. I picked this restaurant on purpose. I’m at that table, you know which one. The one with the peace lilies. I’m sulking.

4y. I don’t want to have to imagine your face. I’ve done it enough, I’m very accomplished. But I’m tired of the work. I’d rather see you. I want to hear you tell me this story, with your voice. I like the way you sound, especially when you’re pleased with yourself. I’d like to listen, to touch some exposed part of you that isn’t your face. Which isn’t to say that I don’t want to touch your face. I like how your face feels when it’s in my hand. I’d like to touch your mouth with my thumb, make a line around the changing speed of your breath.

4z. If you had allowed your urge to ditch Jonathan to triumph, where would we be right now? If Patrice hadn’t fallen ill, where would we be right now?

 

 

 

I’d like to come to your house.

May I come to your house?

  
J


	16. how to get through all 2 hrs & 40 mins of the james comey hearing (II)

14\. Fail completely. Fail to the skin. Travel through all the grief stages & do it so hard that you end up dizzy w/hyperventilating, tissuing the skin off your nostrils, abrading your top lip until it swells up into a caricature of a wound

15\. Or a long & grinding breathless kiss

16\. Or a drenched & blood-blooming pussy

17\. a.k.a. Your Other Mouth™

18\. The image of him, the coddled angles. Harsh lights sharp on his worn places, the skin losing its fidelity to the flesh beneath—all of it does things to your bones. Your muscles struggle to muffle the way his voice rings inside them & ha ha yeah right OK that vibration, that tone, it’s owning your blood.

19\. Even with most of a country between you.

20\. Stop fighting. All your strength is gone anyway.

21\. Surrender.


	17. tales from the vienna woods

I didn’t expect to hear a knock on a Saturday

& I didn’t, not at first.

I was in the kitchen. I had music on. I washed my dinner dishes & hummed along, watched my hands churn the water. I danced. Blue light filled the kitchen windows. Then the knock came loud & quick, it was three sharp percussions, firm enough to rattle glass. Precise.

The back of my neck prickled. I stopped what I was doing. The goosebumps turned lazy, crept up into my scalp. I listened to the pounding of my heart. I dropped the pan, rinsed off my hands. Grabbed a towel. Trotted through the living room. Dried my hands. I switched on a lamp.

I put a hand on the door, unlocked it. I tossed the towel aside.

I wanted to think something like _I didn’t think he’d show or I should pretend that I was asleep when he asks me later on why I didn’t come to the door when my car was in the driveway_ but I couldn’t summon it. Instead of thought, I had a chestful of hot breath  & a mind full of low red humming. My blood drummed around an image of some small exhausted thing, a weakened animal shoved back into the shore. I had no energy left for lies.

I pulled the door open. He made a long shadow & I walked the door open wider. I didn’t want to cross it.

He strode into my living room.

“The coat rack is there.” I pointed. “I was washing dishes.” I snatched the towel off the end table, dried spots on my hands that I missed. “So I didn’t hear you at first.”

Jim stood still. “Shall I take off my shoes?”

“Oh.” I bit my lip. “If you would, that’d be great.” I blushed, waved with the towel. “Shoes go over there.”

“OK.”

My feet made a meandering perimeter on their way to the kitchen. His shoes came off with an unstudied haste. I turned my back on the kitchen’s warm light.

The scarf came off in languid coils; he cradled it to the coat rack with both hands. I watched him. The shoulders of his long black wool loosened up & slid off. He grabbed it by the back of the collar. My breath did things. I watched him hang it up.

“Do you want a drink?”

He shook his head. “No.”

My face hot, I watched the hang of his sweater & the way his long thighs disturbed the fit of his khaki pants. “OK.”

“Do you…” He turned, moved his chin at the doorway. He glanced over my shoulder. “Need to finish your dishes?”

I listened to the silent house, its emptiness of rooms like a deep & tranquil sleep. The sound of his voice, the care built into it & its masterful control of breath made my awareness of its proximity, the room’s humble quiet, feel like an imposition. Past the windows, the thick stand of trees erased all street noise.

“It’s just a frying pan,” I said, my body warming up. I twisted the towel. I watched his face. “It’s not cast iron, so it doesn’t need anything like immediate attention.”

He looked at my face like he owned it. “OK.” He blinked, started to smile. His words warmed themselves. “That’s good.”

That smile—well, it was the start of a smile, an urge toward one that didn’t follow itself toward any kind of completion. Just a sweet flutter & a spark dying out. It was a bit of nothing that came and went but while it was there it softened the rest of his face, undressed it enough to shove my lungs & jerk my hips. My breath rushed. My mouth opened.

“It is, yeah.” My belly tightened with heat. I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “Do you mind if I have a drink?”

“No, of course not.”

I went for the fridge, pulled out a half-empty bottle of rosé. “I had dinner with my sisters last night.” I put the bottle on the counter, opened a cabinet. I listened to his feet hit the tile. “All four of them.” I cracked a shaky smile. “And this is what we _didn’t_ drink.”

“You’ve got a nice place, here.” The tile amplified & flattened the lowered sound of his voice. “With all these old growth trees around.”

He put his hand on the counter. I glanced at the spread of his narrow-waisted fingers, their blunt nails. I twisted the cork. “Thank you.”

The light in the kitchen window had abandoned a glassy cobalt, dropped into a shade like a bruise. The counter was dark too, a subdued granite.

He shifted his weight. “You’re surprised.”

“Yes.” My breath quickened. “I guess I…” I grabbed the bottle by its sweaty neck. “I would’ve thought you’d choose a weekday night, over a Saturday night.”

“Well.” He chuckled. “Last night, it was apparent even from the street that you weren’t accepting any more visitors.”

“Yeah, no.” I filled the glass. “I was not.” I put the bottle down. “All those sisters, they…” I lifted the glass, took a sip. “Come here to be adults, you know. To leave their kids with their fathers and get a little drunk and act saucy.”

“That sounds nice.”

I held the glass close to my mouth. “They think so.”

His voice relinquished its familiar affability, wrapped itself in a soft crumbling tenderness. “My wife’s not home, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“I—” I took a sip. My cheeks burned. “That is what I was getting at, kind of.” I put the glass down, wiped my mouth. “I was…uh, well, trying not to go there actually but…” I took a shaky breath. I tried to arm my smile. “Here we are, I guess.”

He took his hand off the counter. I held my breath. His body leaned. My eyes dropped & he slipped the narrow stem of the glass between his fingers, cupped its round glass bottom. My mouth went dry.

His voice silkened. “Do you mind?”

“No.”

He lifted the glass. I turned, watched it go up. He took the rim into his mouth, tilted it. Wine pooled across his upper lip. “It’s good.” He looked into the glass, gave the wine a swirl. Smiled. “Dry.”

The heavy restlessness in my breath squeezed my throat. My chest built up a slow burn & my head filled with a rush of dull thick pulsing. My guts, strung too tight, hummed. The insides of my nostrils ached. My lungs started to quiver. I turned toward him, my mouth opening & my tongue digging for words. Tears stung my eyes.

He put the glass down.

Vicious and overflowing, tears cut crawling lines down my trembling cheeks.

The glass scraped stone.

He palmed the small of my back. The spread of his fingers warm & unraveling my stilled breath, he pulled on me—that pressure was so slight—until I was up against him. My stomach fluttered. I put my hands on him, heard his shortened breath. The wet & hesitant part of his lips.

The wine’s bubbles crawled up the sides of the glass.

He slid a hand beneath my hair, cupped the nape of my neck.

Water dripped into the filled sink. The rest of the kitchen held a thick and gentle silence.

I closed my eyes & listened to his breathing, how it heavied on the exhale, around the harsh quiver caught in his throat. He rubbed the hairline behind my ear with his thumb. The corners of my mouth trembled. He used his thumbs to wipe underneath my eyes. My mouth opened. He held my face like my cheekbones might cut him. I drew in a hesitant breath.

“I-I…”

He brought his mouth to the top of my head. My joints twitched one at a time until my runaway breathing pounded them into a hot looseness. He gripped the back of my neck, breathed into my hair. It came out just above the wild drumming of my heart. “Shhhh.”

He pulled my face into his body & my throat convulsed. My belly shook. “I-I’m…”

“Don’t,” he whispered.

“I’m so embarrassed.”

“Don’t be.”

“If you…look, I…” I pushed down my voice, struggled against the urge to sob. “If…if you want to go, I—”

He leaned down, pressed a soft & lingering kiss into my forehead. “I don’t.”

My neck weakened & gooseflesh cupped my jaw, prickled down my chest. My mouth fell open. My breath shuddered. “I am so fucking ridiculous.”

“You’re not.”

“But…who—what kind of—who _cries_ right now?”

He kissed the tensed-up space between my eyebrows. My fingers twitched. He trailed breath across one trembling eyelid & I let out a quiet fast-breathing startled whimper sound. He brought his mouth close to the side of my nose. He ran his thumb across my upper lip & I breathed through my mouth, took hold of his wrist. My breath got noisy.

“You.” He muffled it with the salty hollow of my cheek. His breath stuttered. “You do.”

I tugged his hand & slid the spread of it past the neckline of my thin cotton camisole; I arched my back, listened to his breath surge at the way I curved the oversized splay of his hand up beneath the round of my small tit. My lungs were too tight. His thumb felt for my length of stiffened nipple & my spine jerked, weathered the hard little shudders kindled by his slow stroking. My heart pounded. I whimpered at him, the words strained through a clench of my teeth.

“Kiss me.”

He tipped my head all the way back, lifted me by my cradled nape & blanketed my mouth with the haste of his, muscled a raw frustrated sound down the back of my throat. I didn’t fight the threatening softness, the swoon happening in my neck. I put a hand on his face, steadied him there—his lips an eager yet restrained smothering, his tongue wet silk, his breath scorched—and gripped one shoulder, everything about him a touch away from blatant trembling. His breath changed its course. He reined in the thrust of his mouth. He made his lips hover until I lunged, chased them with a shuddering in my throat & a wet prickle on the insides of my cheeks. He tongued the slide of my breath & my mouth flooded. A whimper tangled up in my nostrils.

I pushed my belly into his thighs & he drank my fitful wet & then I needed unencumbered breath, some chill happening in my mouth; my body was strung too tight, shaking at all this friction—I let my head drop, pushed my forehead into his ribs. I gripped the back of his sweater. I groaned.

His fingers found & caught the base of my neck. He squeezed.

“There’s an upstairs,” I breathed. My arms climbed him & I thought _there’s a bedroom and it’s upstairs_ but my mind was too occupied with my body’s obsession, the skin’s relentless focus on my slow upslide of hands, my noseful of salty musk. The resolute presence of his warm flesh. The slow heavy thud of waiting in my lower belly.

A delicate rasp of high neck skin scraped my fingertips. His mouth drifted close to the shake in my fingers & I trapped wet puffs of hot breath between my knuckles.

“Bedroom?”

I bit my lip, nodded.

I curved my hand along the crest of his cheekbone & he closed his eyes. He sighed. I watched the skin around his eyes tremble. I pulled him down.

His mouth covered mine with a hard landing that surfaced in a toe-curling bit of breath that wasn’t mine, that came out rough & choked with hungry sound. I steadied my face against the unfettered need of his tongue. He devoured my bottom lip. He bit down, a tender scrape. He growled. His hand cradled the entire back of my head. I moaned. He moved his mouth against my chin, panted into my skin.

I waited until his fingers tightened on my scalp.

“Yes,” I sighed.

He mouthed my jaw, tongued the sharp of its long line. My voice shivered. He uttered a trembling raw vulnerable little breath sound that clenched deep up in me & all of my flesh pulsed hot, my skin fluttering into gooseflesh, my animal neck swooning. My fingers curled around his hair. Each wet kiss—soft & trembling with restraint, backdropped with irregular puffs of breath—foretold the lingering ghost of a sweet wound, of runaway blood harboring inside a mouth.

His hands girdled my hips. His fingertips dug in. He hauled me up against him.

I shuddered. Gripped the back of his neck. Whimpered. Lost my breath.

“Oh Jesus.” His voice broke.

“Just,” I gasped, hooked thumbs into my elastic waistband. “Do it, just…” I shoved it down, bunched the fabric up against his gripping fingers. “God, I…” My teeth ground. “Need,” I whispered.

He extricated fingers, dug them underneath the rolled-up clasp of my pants; I let go & he went onto his knees, those long thighs making a well-balanced architecture against the floor. He dragged them down, my breath hollowing. My mouth shaped out a burst of noise, my eyes stunned into a soft daze at the way he disentangled one foot, freed the other, went back for my worn cotton panties.

“I—”

He kissed the skin just beneath my navel. I closed my mouth. He thumbed my wet patch & my eyelids fluttered; I hissed in breath, the ache behind it tightening. I bit my lip. I looked down, watched his hands pull my panties across my hipbones. They slid back up, splayed fingers around my waist. He nosed the hard curve of my pubic bone & his fingers flexed, a simmering rasp eroding most of his voice.

“I want this to be good for you.”

I stroked his hair. The heat in his scalp was immense. “I know.”

He buried his mouth in my swollen slit & my knees shook loose. His fingers tightened.

“God you’re wet.”

I shivered at his guttural breath, at the rough edge in his voice.

“Yeah,” I whimpered.

At his first lick a storm broke loose in my body & twanged my muscles until the sag came—that ornery heat, a lassitude of overworked blood at the end of a long day. I hummed out a soft moan. He steered my hips upright, inflicted that slow slick muscle on the raw pounding in my clit; he caressed its throbbing, cradled the erratic twitching of its hovering tantrum until the cave of my pussy shuddered. I threw back my head. Made fists. Writhed. Groaned until my throat hurt.

He wrestled the undulation in my thighs, slammed me back into the counter. The heels of my hands dug into the counter’s edge. My spine refused calm. My ribs stacked breath, my mouth roughed out words:

“Gawd…

The long muscles in my legs twitching. The curves in my fingers twitching. The small of my back twitching.

“Jim…

My voice startling my heart-booming silence.

“… _Jesus_!”

He hugged one of my thighs up onto his shoulder. I grunted, pulled his hair. He moaned a thick deep hum up into my hole & my hips rocked. Slow. Gentle. The tears left in me dried up. He steadied my weakening knee. My hot skin evaporated them & salt crumbled away. I struggled toward air.

 _Pain signaling is done_. The words happened inside a panting delirium. _Crying is done, what’s done is done, this is done, I am done_

& then

My tendons strained beneath the curl of his arm. He murmured beseeching word-sounds, a vulgarity made prayer. My blood piled up, heavy with heat, until there was nothing but a drowning: the animal body’s quaking surrender to all that is flesh & drive & heat & motion—for a booming orgasm stomps out its own territory & leaves no room for tears, for oxygen; inside that heaving house, lost maelstrom, throbbing temple there is one sparking nerve’s shrine to God & a moaning prayer for ignition

& then

I groaned, fought the strength that abandoned my legs. I clutched his hair. I rode the subtle rhythm of his devouring velvet mouth.

Loud & ragged, a strangled cry: “Jim!”

Soft & quiet, a sweet murmuring: “Yes.”

Over & over & again begin.

Back, forth, back.

A single shared breath.

A moaned litany.

“Jim!”

“Yes.”

“Jim!”

“Yes.”

Orgasm struck. It flashed through my body, whited out the world.

My eyes opened, unfocused & blurring; my aftershocks came in silky-wet little bursts. He caught me by the waist. My chest rose and fell. Gooseflesh swept me up in waves. My tiny nape hairs stiffened. I got dizzy.

“Hey…” He stood, kept his hands on my waist. “Hey,” he whispered, his mouth close to my forehead. His breath filled my hair. His eviscerated voice warmed my skin. “You still with me?”

“Y-Yeah.” I nodded. “Yes, I’m…” I swallowed & my voice fell into a whisper. “Still with you.” I trembled into a smile. “That was…” I let out a breathless chuckle. “Good for me.”

“Yeah.” He took me in his arms, rubbed his forehead into my hair. He chuckled. “I caught that.”

I started to laugh. “You caught that.” I hugged him tight. “Good, that’s…” I muffled my fading voice in his sweater. “Good.”

“Do you need to sit?”

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m good.” I closed my eyes. My legs wobbled. “Do you…” I lowered my voice. His heart boomed in my ear. “You still want to go upstairs?”

“God yes.”

I took his hand & stepped away from him, my skin muttering at the loss of heat. I led him through my living room, my knees soft. My step unsteady. My heartbeat seemed too loud, my mind a tranquil nothing. The hollowed room amplified the noise of his feet. It corralled the rush of my breath. I climbed the stairs. Listened to the way they creaked beneath unexpected weight.

He lifted his hand up, palmed the ceiling.

I glanced over my shoulder, up at the sound of his fingers; he smiled in the shadows, teeth glinting.

A lurch happened in my chest like the rustle of soft wings, a weakness trapped. My ribs a cage. I smiled back.

My bedroom took up most of the upstairs & faced away from the road; its one window showed flecks of night sky through broad leaves & the one light left on in my backyard neighbor’s house. I let go of his hand. I walked in, turned on a lamp. Honeyed light spilled across the rumpled half of the bed. Shadows retreated into corners, darkened there. The air smelled like clean sweat, perfumed moisturizer, dryer sheets, forced-air heat, dust.

“There’s a cat here somewhere,” I said. “But she’s shy.”

“One shy cat.” He looked around. “OK. I’ll watch my step, then.”

I tugged down the blankets on the made-up side of the bed. The breeze they made chilled my naked legs. I glanced at the movement he made, smiled a little. “I’m sure you have already terrorized her with your huge feet.”

“If she is only used to sisters, I’m sure you’re right.”

I straightened. “You really want to know if you’re the only man welcome in this room?”

“That’s not what I said.” He halted at the foot of the bed. “But…am I allowed to be curious?”

“No.” I shrugged a shoulder, sat on the edge of the bed. “Not really.” The frame sighed. “But Jonathan never made it this far,” I went on, my voice brushing past my teeth. “If that answers a question for you.”

“It doesn’t.” He circled around the bed. “But I appreciate it just the same.”

I let my breath get heavier at his approach. That I didn’t have to hold back, that the idea of it as a welcome thing, was enough to lighten my head.

“You’re…still all right? With this?”

His proximity was enough to warp the sense of space in my skin. My languid skin, spent at his hand & obedient already. It woke all the way up to remember his body heat.

“I can hear something like a…” He sat. Moved my hair behind one shoulder. “A catch in your breath.”

The look on his face struck a bruise in me, something tender & immediately lost in my body’s red dark; I bit my lip. The wince in my flesh came lower than my guts, came hotter than a well-packed cavern full of blood. I tilted my face down, looked at him. Lifted my eyes.

“It’s not fear.”

Sugared with the sweet of knowing what a kiss in this moment could feel like, after long stretches of wondering, it tremored in my mouth like a thirst, an ache of yearning. The insides of my cheeks ached. Even my breath hurt.

“I don’t…” He palmed a long slow length of my spine & his voice thinned out, his face filled with a wavering tenderness. “Want you to be afraid of me.”

“I-I’m not.” I closed my eyes, let my breath do what it wanted. I wanted to tremble. My pussy going throb throb throb. Just from that. “Not really.”

My hair had dropped out of place. He put it back & it was the lightest touch, but the cascade of goosebumps started all over again, swift and sharp; it spread across the backs of my arms, hardened my nipples. My voice turned husky. “Even though I should be.”

He kissed me. My breath threw off its initial chaos for a strong rhythm. I groped for the hem of my camisole. My mouth sought out his fresh familiarity, remembered to open just enough for his soft nudge of tongue. He pulled the camisole over my head. I climbed into his lap & his fingers spanned the vulnerable space between my shoulder blades.

I unbuckled his pants. His breath tasted like brimstone, like salty ocean rain.

“I really want this.”

He cupped my tit, brought his mouth close to my ear. He stroked my nipple. My heart raced.

“I know.”

I slid my hand into rumpled boxer fabric; he was hard, the skin of his cock stretched & heated by a soft pulse—a muted heart rhythm that made his thigh muscles jump, unsteadied his breath. A brief tremor passed between his eyebrows. I stroked it, listened to the chords in his throat change. The expression on his face unraveled. His eyes struggled to hold a focus.

“Are you…” I let the whisper trail off, fall into his mouth.

With both hands, he moved back my hair.

I breathed on his lips. I tightened my grip. “Are you sure?”

His voice rustled, gained a gritty edge. “Yes.”

“Because…” I kissed him with a bare brush of breath, a glimmer of heat evaporating. I finger-combed his hair. “You can’t take this back.”

“I know.”

He pulled a condom out of his pocket. I eased it out of his fingers, tore it open. I looked down. He rested a hand on the back of my neck. I rolled the condom on. He kissed my temple.

I slid the head of his cock through my wet. He took hold of my waist. I made the sinking slow; his cock pushed a wild thudding burn into me, bottled up the breath in my throat. He breathed faster. My toes curled into shaking knots.

“You feel so good,” he murmured.

My breath left me in a shivering burst. I buried my face in his neck & held it there until it rioted itself out, until it found a fitful sleep. He slid a hand up my spine. My back shuddered. He took hold of my nape & my pussy twitched.

“Oh God,” I breathed.

He turned his mouth into my hair, voice strained into half-whisper. “Ride me.” His breath roughened. “Like you want to.”

The surge of heat at the bottom of his voice ruined me. It rippled off my skin in a phantom caress, like actual steam peeling away into lift. I pushed past my own fever, put hands on his shoulders.

My belly rolled into his & I thought… _don’t try to explain the miracle, kiss me on the lips_

“Like this?”

He gripped the junctures of buttocks and thighs, slid me up. My hands tightened. He lowered me, let my weight sway. He loosed his wine-salted breath in my face. “Like this.”

I gathered flank-bound handfuls of his sweater. I pulled up. He lifted his arms for it & as I watched that soft thick weave—along with the heathered t-shirt beneath—reveal his skin, I thought… _when someone quotes the old poetic image about clouds gradually uncovering the moon, loosen the strings of your robe_

“Like this,” I murmured.

I spread my knees & slid myself up the front of him, down, up; his fingertips dug into the flexing labor of my flesh, his breath narrowing to a hiss. Friction built up in waves.

In the dark, behind trembling lids, his hand first found & then crossed the topography of my face. The skin was warm, smooth, dry. A finger or a thumb found my mouth. It smelled like paper, sweat, a trace of onions. It outlined the answering burst of my breath.

He whispered my name & I moved harder.

He groaned.

“It’s OK,” I murmured. “Don’t wait for me.”

I kept my eyes closed. I listened to the chop in his breath, the sounds of effort melting through great slides of air into a loosening, a man-whimper, a noise disarticulated past vulnerability. A burst of yearning strummed my leg muscles, spurred my hips. His hands spasmed, the groan in his throat starting & stopping. I kept my slide smooth & wet.

He moaned my name.

I hugged him, rested my cheek in his hair. I clenched around him. “Yes,” I murmured.

He cried out.

“Yes,” I whispered.

I stilled & the room’s persistent silence grappled with the slowing thud of my heart, with the roar of his subsiding breath.

I climbed off. Took the loaded condom with me into the bathroom, tossed it into the waste can. I plopped down onto the toilet. Peed. Like a good girl.

I closed my eyes & sighed. My bladder ached as it shrunk, the rushing stream striking little contractions like sparks off my still-swollen clit. I had been taught the holy gospel of post-coital urination first by my mother & then by a nurse in the campus clinic after suffering through my first raging UTI for half a semester; _it’s the friction_. I heard it in my head as I wiped, the chorused voices of mom and nurse. _The friction makes it easier for the bacteria to get in_.

I flushed the toilet. I didn’t turn on a light. I rinsed off my hands, grabbed a towel. Dried my fingers. Didn’t glance at my reflection.

“You OK in there?”

“Yeah.” It felt like half a lie. “Just…you know, performing the obligatory post-coital pee.”

He laughed, the voice underlining it unwound & heavy. The sound of it indulgent, inviting, in a way I had never heard before. “Gotcha.”

I finished with the towel, left it folded on the rim of the sink. I re-entered the bedroom space & felt his eyes catch my movement; he watched me circle to the other side of the bed.

I pushed my hair back, glanced at him. I smiled a little. “That look is making me feel extra naked.”

He’d left his pants on the floor, left his boxers on his body. He climbed up closer to the pillow; he turned & folded his long legs, all that spine bowing. He folded his hands. He chuckled. “You are extra naked.”

“I am not, this is…” I looked down, studied the front of myself. I held my arms out. “This is just standard naked, Jim.”

“Regulation nudity?”

“Very.” I laughed until my face flushed. “Quite.”

His voice strung itself out into a heavy softness & the edges of it shivered, raw. “Are you wanting to lie down?”

“Regulation nudity means cold.” I arranged the covers, hit the mattress hip-first. I tried not to listen to all that but it struck me in the blood, made it race. I pivoted my legs. “Yes, I want to lie down.”

He watched my feet slide under the rumpled comforter. “May I lie down with you?”

“Of course.” I moved onto my side & straightened out my legs. I pulled the pillow beneath my cheek. “There’s not a lot of room, I mean.” I closed my eyes. “Not what you’re used to, probably.” I sighed. “But you’re welcome to what there is.”

He picked up the leading edge of blankets, pulled it up around my shoulders. He leaned over me. I opened my eyes. He turned off the lamp. Thick blue night filtered in through the window, carried traces of streetlight. A wind on its way to somewhere hit the trees & shook branches, stirred up giant overlapping leaf-shadows. In the dark, my mattress made noises beneath his weight. He tucked his warmth underneath my pile of blankets.

“You can come over here, you know.”

“I know.”

A subdued urge toward tears stung my eyes. Underneath that threatened a shift in my ribs, a turning-over, a hollowing that felt a wind or a free-fall; it imitated my body’s lurking precipice of sleep.

His voice opened, bared a burgeoning rush. “Do you?”

“Yes.” This time all the things in his voice struck deep & hard, quivered up through my breastbone. My eyes filled & I turned my breath into the pillow, wiped my eyelashes. My voice wore itself out. “I think so.”

He reached over. I felt the reorientation of his weight happen beneath me, then a movement of air. His hand found my face. Patted the curve in my cheekbone. His fingertips sought my hairline & his thumb traced the bottom ridge of my eye socket, lingered at the outer corner. His touch was hesitant, restrained.

I slid a hand over the back of his wrist. Kissed the heel of his hand. “I don’t think I can talk right now,” I whispered.

He took his hand away, moved those fingers through my hair. “OK.”

I kept still until my body disconnected from its own sense of place. Dark brimmed behind my closed lids. His warmth crept over me & I listened to his breath, waited for its telltale shifts.

He moved closer until his voice happened inside my hair. “Do you want to sleep?”

“No,” I whispered. My skin landed on his skin & my tension departed. He put an arm around me. I covered my face with his chest. “But I need to.”

“Me too,” he whispered back.

“OK.”

He touched my hair. I drifted.

“OK.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lines _don’t try to explain the miracle, kiss me on the lips_ & _when someone quotes the old poetic image about clouds gradually uncovering the moon, loosen the strings of your robe_ are excerpted from Rumi's _Like This_.


	18. an american six-footer

03/03/2017 18:37 [Jon] Hey I looked everywhere & couldn’t find u  
03/03/2017 18:39 [Jon] I’m @the 3rd level elevator in the parking garage  
03/03/2017 18:47 [Jon] Farrah? Where the fuck r u?  
03/03/2017 18:50 [Jon] Hello? I’m still waiting? & it’s cold AF out here?   
03/03/2017 18:52 [Jon] Hello? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?  
03/03/2017 18:56 [Jon] Starting 2 feel like u ghosted me & I must say that I expected a little more maturity from u  
03/03/2017 19:01 [Jon] I mean u could’ve just said go fuck yrself 2 my face if that’s what u wanted  
03/03/2017 19:23 [Jon] R u even still in this building?  
03/03/2017 19:37 [Jon] OK this a ghosting & fuck u too  
03/03/2017 19:38 [Jon] *is a ghosting  
03/03/2017 19:56 [Jon] OK was it the pussy joke? Really? b/c I didn’t think u would be so sensitive, it was a joke, I WAS KIDDING  
03/03/2017 20:14 [Jon] OK fine FINE  
03/03/2017 20:15 [Jon] I can own up 2 it, it was a dumb thing 2 say & insensitive  
03/03/2017 20:16 [Jon] I was out of line & yes I know better & yes my dad woulda taken me out in the damn woodshed & I’d be lucky 2 have skin left on my ass & I would’ve earned all that too  
03/03/2017 20:58 [Jon] I apologize 4 being gross & hurting yr feelings OK  
03/03/2017 23:34 [Jon] Good night  
03/13/2017 14:56 [Jon] Can we talk plz?  
03/13/2017 14:58 [Jon] U wanna get some coffee?  
03/13/2017 15:31 [Me] I’m out of town until Tuesday  
03/13/2017 15:40 [Jon] U have time 2 talk then? I can call u  
03/13/2017 15:43 [Me] Out of town = working, which means I don’t have time for this  
03/13/2017 16:33 [Jon] I’d like 2 see u & talk  
03/13/2017 16:37 [Me] I’m sure you would  
03/13/2017 16:40 [Jon] OK OK u don’t need 2 cunt out over it FFS if u don’t want 2 just say no & tell me 2 shove it. I can take it, I promise  
03/13/2017 16:50 [Me] No you can’t & “cunt out?” Really? Such rude, much wow. Especially for someone who’s trying to get a coffee date  
03/13/2017 17:48 [Jon] Sorry  
03/13/2017 17:50 [Me] You’re not, though  
03/13/2017 17:51 [Jon] U know what I meant  
03/13/2017 17:55 [Me] I did & it’s still rude  
03/13/2017 18:12 [Me] You could kiss up a little better than this. Make a pucker shape with your lips at least. Fake some wet smoochie sounds. Don’t boys even try anymore?  
03/13/2017 18:14 [Jon] No need 2 get yr panties all twisted over it  
03/13/2017 18:16 [Me] I know what you meant & BTW my panties aren’t your business  
03/13/2017 18:19 [Jon] Not 4 my lack of trying  
03/13/2017 18:21 [Me] You don’t try very hard  
03/13/2017 18:22 [Jon] I promise 2 fail better in the future  
03/13/2017 18:23 [Me] LOL  
03/13/2017 18:23 [Jon] OK r u actually laughing r/n? Or r u just writing LOL 2 sugarcoat this shit?  
03/13/2017 18:25 [Me] I might’ve uttered a tiny lonely little chuckle. Just one. It expired soon after, though. COD was lack of oxygen & pure loneliness  
03/13/2017 18:25 [Jon] LOL  
03/13/2017 18:26 [Me] Fine. OK. A coffee. One. Having lunch w/Julie Wednesday anyway. You gonna be on site?  
03/13/2017 18:28 [Jon] No not @lunch time but I can meet u at yr restaurant or someplace else (b/c Juju doesn’t like me)  
03/13/2017 18:30 [Me] LMAO oh believe me, I know Julie doesn’t like you  
03/13/2017 18:31 [Jon] Since she’s got no problems shit talking me 2 my face, I’m guessing it’s a full-on feces fiesta behind my back?  
03/13/2017 18:32 [Me] Hahahaha you could call it that & also you don’t get to call her Juju  
03/13/2017 18:34 [Jon] I won’t tell if u won’t  
03/15/2017 12:57 [Me] Where are you?  
03/15/2017 13:06 [Jon] Just parked gimme a few  
03/15/2017 13:07 [Me] K  
03/15/2017 20:03 [Jon] Thnx 4 seeing me  
03/15/2017 20:04 [Me] I had an OK time  
03/15/2017 20:06 [Jon] LOL ilu 2  
03/15/2017 20:07 [Me] Don’t push it  
03/15/2017 20:08 [Jon] OK I’m v. fond of u  
03/15/2017 20:10 [Me] Better. :) I’ll grudgingly admit the truth. I didn’t suffer.  
03/15/2017 20:11 [Jon] Good 2 know :)  
03/15/2017 20:12 [Jon] That suit & those shoes = something else tho, damn. Not sure if I want u 2 serve me a warrant or if I want u 2 serve me something else. HOT  
03/15/2017 20:14 [Me] Don’t let it go to your head b/c it’s got nothing to do with you  
03/15/2017 20:17 [Jon] Nothing wrong w/my eyes, I can still sit back & enjoy the view  
03/15/2017 20:19 [Me] Since the conversation’s going this way, I can admit your suit was nothing to sneeze at & to paraphrase Warren Zevon your hair was perfect  
03/15/2017 20:20 [Me] (& I know you knew it too)  
03/15/2017 20:22 [Jon] Wow @all this hot disclaimer action. “B/c the convo is going this way.” Haha. Thnx  
03/15/2017 20:23 [Me] You are the vainest man I know  
03/15/2017 20:25 [Jon] I have 2 stay pretty 4 the camera, it’s my burden. Did u know Julie refers 2 my hair as 50 waves of gray (& does it rather snottily, I might add)?  
03/15/2017 20:27 [Me] Of course I do. It’s not just you, tho. Someone else is 25 waves of gray, I can’t remember who, so don’t feel too victimized  
03/15/2017 20:28 [Jon] Tapper’s 25 waves & he’s her favorite  
03/15/2017 20:31 [Me] Tapper isn’t as rude as you & empirically has less gray (tho I guess he has more waves? WTF is this logic? IDEK…I give up)  
03/15/2017 20:34 [Jon] LOL idk either but if Tapper is 25 waves & I’m 50 waves then wtf is Cooper?  
03/15/2017 20:35 [Me] Anderson Cooper is a perfect darling & thus those glimmering alabaster locks are above reproach  
03/15/2017 20:36 [Jon] Omg lawwwwwwl  
05/15/2017 20:37 [Me] :-)  
03/15/2017 09:26 [Jon] Hey u busy tonight?  
03/15/2017 11:34 [Me] Yes  
03/20/2017 08:21 [Jon] How abt Sat?  
03/20/2017 12:02 [Me] I can’t  
03/27/2017 09:42 [Jon] U busy? Want 2 get lunch?  
03/27/2017 09:59 [Me] Yes/too busy  
03/28/2017 13:12 [Jon] I’ve got tickets 2 that stand-up thing? This Sat? U interested?  
03/28/2017 23:25 [Me] I can’t  
04/05/2017 07:46 [Jon] I’ve got a table @1789 tonight, let me feed u in style. Any interest?  
04/05/2017 14:39 [Me] I’ve got plans tonight but thanks for asking  
04/13/2017 17:04 [Jon] Today was just stupid. This administration is lowering my IQ, swear 2 god & pinkies. U wanna meet somewhere 4 drinks?  
04/13/2017 17:06 [Me] I can’t  
04/19/2017 21:21 [Jon] U working a lot r/n?  
04/19/2017 21:38 [Me] Yes  
04/19/2017 23:52 [Jon] Me too  
04/24/2017 10:13 [Jon] Hey? U ok?   
04/24/2017 16:19 [Jon] I haven’t seen u around 4 awhile? Julie says yr 2 busy 4 lunch w/her even? No more Wednesdays? What’s up w/that?  
04/24/2017 20:28 [Jon] Hey? Farrah? Bueller? I mean I don’t want 2 bug u but  
04/26/2017 08:50 [Jon] Whoa wait Julie says yr moving 2 California? WTF? Did u get a transfer?  
04/26/2017 11:32 [Me] No, I didn’t get transferred. I quit.  
04/26/2017 11:34 [Jon] WHAT WHY  
04/26/2017 14:07 [Me] I wanted to.  
04/26/2017 14:13 [Jon] What the hell? What happened? I thought u loved working 4/FBI?  
04/26/2017 19:23 [Me] A school friend contacted me last week. She runs a private security firm in Los Angeles & she’s been put on bed rest (for a high-risk pregnancy)  
04/26/2017 19:24 [Me] & she wanted to know if I knew anyone qualified to run the firm in her absence  
04/26/2017 19:25 [Me] & I do. Me. I’m qualified. It’s a 1 yr contract & I need to get the fuck out of DC for awhile  
04/26/2017 20:15 [Jon] Why?  
04/26/2017 20:18 [Me] Are you kidding? You really have to ask? I thought you might’ve noticed how this town has been hemorrhaging staff. Darth Cheeto is certifiable, it’s like rats on a sinking ship  
04/26/2017 20:20 [Jon] So? All of 2016 was nuts & everything’s been xtra nuts since Jan  
04/26/2017 20:23 [Me] I have other reasons & I’m not going to discuss them w/you (b/c they’re not about you & ergo are precisely none of your business)  
04/26/2017 20:24 [Jon] …she said, mysteriously. OK fine, I won’t pry. I really want 2 tho  
04/26/2017 20:25 [Me] I know you do, and please don’t. I am not in the mood, OK?  
04/26/2017 20:26 [Jon] OK OK. A whole yr? Damn  
04/26/2017 20:27 [Me] Yeah  
04/26/2017 20:28 [Jon] Yr coming back, right?  
04/26/2017 20:29 [Me] Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe not.  
04/26/2017 20:31 [Jon] But why would u stay there? What abt yr sisters? Yr parents? Yr friends?  
04/26/2017 20:33 [Me] So? What about them? People leave home all the time. What about your family? Aren’t you from CA or OR or something? What are you doing here?  
04/26/2017 20:35 [Jon] I’m from CA. U actually get along w/yours & I’m a huge slut 4 politix. I mean, I’d get on my knees & fellate Capitol Hill if I could  
04/26/2017 20:36 [Me] LMAO  
04/26/2017 20:37 [Jon] & I’m not close w/my bros & mom. Not like u r w/yr sisters + parents  
04/26/2017 20:39 [Me] Don’t bug me about it, OK? Maybe I’ll like it, you never know  
04/26/2017 20:41 [Jon] & I wouldn’t want 2 go back 2 local politix unless I had 2. Sacramento = dusty desert hell. U even been 2 CA?  
04/26/2017 20:45 [Me] Yes, of course I have. I’ve been to the field office.  
04/26/2017 20:47 [Jon] OK then. I can’t imagine u dealing w/the cult of celeb very well (esp if yr friend’s security co. is *that* kind of security co.)  
04/26/2017 20:53 [Me] It is that kind of security company, as a matter of fact. I’ll be fine.  
04/26/2017 20:55 [Jon] When u leaving? U wanna get food/go out/fuck b4 u go?  
04/26/2017 20:57 [Me] You had to throw a fuck in there. You just had to. Of course you did. Why am I surprised?  
04/26/2017 20:58 [Jon] It’s just an offer, feel free 2 turn me down (like u have 100 times b4, lol)  
04/26/2017 20:59 [Me] You have not made a hundred offers  
04/26/2017 21:00 [Jon] No, it just feels like 100 offers  
04/26/2017 21:12 [Me] HA HA HA. I have way too much to do in too short a time, but thank you  
04/26/2017 21:13 [Jon] Yr always welcome. Good luck  
04/26/2017 21:15 [Me] Thank you. I do appreciate it, y’know <3  
04/26/2017 21:16 [Jon] plz txt me b4 u leave  
04/26/2017 21:17 [Me] OK  
04/30/2017 06:02 [Me] …so I’m at the gate & getting ready to board  
04/30/2017 06:32 [Jon] I’m gonna miss u  
04/30/2017 10:28 [Me] I know


	19. 4 voicemails

_Beep_.

“Baaaaarnes! Hey, girl. It’s Smith. I was just thinking about you today. Some of us around here miss your irreverent mouth like burning. I mean like thirst in the desert. Hope everything in California is going your way. Pick an orange for me. Get yourself a nice tan. Next time you’re in town, gimme a call and we’ll grab some tacos.”

  
_Beep_.

“Hey Farrah, it’s Lulu. How’s it going? Did you see any of it? What I saw looked good and stern, you know. Traditional boss-man style. Anyway, good luck with your new job.”

  
_Beep_.

“I tell you, this place just ain’t the same without you. You were never boring. I can’t say that about many people. It’s McDougall, by the way. Your position is still open, hint hint. So when you get tired of all that sickening sunshine…nah, just kidding. I hope your new gig works for you. But you’re missed. Did you watch the hearing?”

  
_Beep_.

“Hello, Farrah. This is Bob…Bob Mueller. I heard this morning that you’ve left the FBI? Is that true? I hope it’s not, but if it is, well…I was really rather surprised at that news, you always seemed like such a good fit. I do hope that if you did it was to pursue better opportunities and not because…well, because you felt unwelcome. If there’s anything I can do for you, please. Don’t hesitate to get in touch. I do hope to hear from you regardless; I’d love to know how you’re doing, and if the rumor does turn out to be correct—I’d like to thank you for your service.”


	20. your father's email

**Jack Barnes** [jbarnes@workplace.org]  
to me

  
hello darling girl

i’m proud of you no matter what trumpelstiltskin and his bevy of shitmonkeys have to say about the fbi and if you talk to james comey today—or any day—you tell him that i said thank god someone somewhere in this fulminating government sewer had the common sense and the moral fiber to step up and do the right thing

we miss you a lot

remind me to drive your car around so the battery doesn’t get flat

also julie’s been taking excellent care of your house and yard

please let us know if you plan to fly back for the 4th

 

  
love

dad


	21. lena's call

_Beep_.

“Hey Farrah, it’s Lena. I know everyone’s probably calling you today…” Soft laughter. “I think everyone’s probably talking to their family FBI members today just because of the big Comey thing but…um, but yeah. Anyway. I can talk if you want to but—you know, no pressure or anything. Sorry if I’m like the 85th person to call you today. Love you. I miss you too. I’ll be home all weekend if you feel like catching up. Bye.”


	22. jamilah's texts

06/08/2017 15:12 [Jamilah] if you’re not busy call me  
06/08/2017 15:14 [Jamilah] but only if you want tho (of course)  
06/08/2017 15:18 [Jamilah] I can’t remember if you worked w/Comey or not  
06/08/2017 15:23 [Jamilah] I have $$$ on yes  
06/08/2017 15:24 [Jamilah] The new guy in the ER wants to throw down, he’s accusing me o/bullshitting for clout re: current events  
06/08/2017 15:25 [Jamilah] (b/c we had it on in the waiting room naturally)  
06/08/2017 15:30 [Jamilah] But I know I’m right  
06/08/2017 15:49 [Me] You’re right  
06/08/2017 15:50 [Jamilah] OH HEY thanku my dude nice excellent I think your cut o’ these spoils is like $3.50 :)))  
06/08/2017 15:51 [Jamilah] can you call or no  
06/08/2017 15:52 [Jamilah] nevermind there’s a big pile up out on 83 inbound so gotta run—go save some lives & shit  
06/08/2017 15:54 [Jamilah] love u + miss u


	23. aziza's call

_Beep_.

“Hey you, Ziz here. Girl…that hearing. Damn. We had like a…whole watch lunch at work, we even catered it. Pizza and subs. Anyways just wanted to see what my one family member in the FBI had to say about it all. I mean…if anything. You worked with Comey directly, yeah? I mean…like, sometimes? He was a nice guy, right? Call me whenever. Love you sis. Bye.”


	24. your mother's texts

06/08/2017 19:14 [Mom] I hope you’re feeling better sweetheart. Remember that you can call me anytime. I’m your mother, it’s my job to listen to you.  
06/08/2017 20:20 [Mom] It’s late here so I am going to bed. Please take good care of yourself. Good night.  
06/08/2017 20:46 [Mom] I’ll call you Sunday afternoon.


	25. scene: phone call/w unscheduled storytime (or, how to tell your sister the truth)

[your camera hurts b/c its lenses are wearied & insulted by too much light]

INT. TINY LIVING ROOM W/ BIG WINDOWS

9:43 p.m. Open windows. Sound of ocean that’s distant but still roaring. The night outside is black but lanced & bleeding distant sparkles. One lamp on b/c indoor light hurts. Soft PJs on because your tender skin can’t take the pressure.

Open wine bottle w/no glass & fuck those long-stemmed excuses to pause between sips—you’re gonna French kiss the bottle’s mouth tonight. You’re gonna fill up until your throat is packed & brimming & you can’t breathe with the weight. You think… _these grapes have suffered through apotheosis to become the god of my mouth_

You glance at the phone when it buzzes.

When Janet’s picture lights up the screen, you pick it up.

YOU (pausing the TV)  
Hey, Janet. Hi. Did mom put you up to this?

JANET  
No.

YOU  
I already talked to her, this afternoon. Why aren’t you sleeping? Don’t you have to work tomorrow?

JANET  
I’m not sleeping because I’m looking after you. Someone has to.

YOU  
No one has to.

JANET  
You’re not OK.

YOU  
Janet, I am—

JANET  
Drunk. You’re drunk.

YOU  
I am not.

JANET  
Don’t bullshit me, Farrah. I know what you sound like drunk. I’ve heard it at least a thousand times and the long distance phone lines are so much better than they used to be. You sound like you’re still in Vienna. And like you’ve at least halfway into a bottle of wine.

YOU  
Dammit, Janet—

JANET (finishes it out Rocky Horror style)  
You love me.

YOU (giggling)  
Yes, even though it’s a struggle.

JANET  
So how are you holding up?

YOU  
What is this language, even. Like…I don’t know, it’s like someone died. Or my husband left me. Again. Even he called me, you know. Aaron did.

JANET  
That’s because even Aaron Cockface Goldfarb, aka Mr. You Owe Me A Functioning Womb, knows how much you loved your job. The FBI is the best thing that ever happened to you. Which is a thing everyone knows about you, by the way.

YOU  
Wow, should I pack my bags? Are we going on a guilt trip? Who’s driving? Can I take second shift at the wheel because honestly I feel like you all loved my job way more than I ever did.

JANET  
Don’t bullshit me, Farrah. And I am saying that to you with all the love and gentleness in this great big shitty world.

YOU  
I’m not.

JANET  
So…you watching the hearing? I don’t hear anything in the background but that doesn’t mean anything. And you’ve crawled into a bottle, so. I guess it streamed just about everywhere. That shit’ll be on the internet until the end of time.

YOU  
Janet—

JANET  
I know watching it or just having it on everywhere has got to be bringing up some feelings for you, and I am just…making myself available. I’m here for you. I’ll pay for this tomorrow but I don’t care.

YOU  
I don’t have feelings, it’s…I’m fine.

JANET  
Calm your tits, Cleopatra. Sit down. I want you to do that much for me if you aren’t already. OK. You sitting?

YOU  
Yeah, I…I was sitting before.

JANET  
Good. Great. I hate to do this, I don’t wanna be the one to beach your whole Denial river barge, but I have had a very long day and what very little patience I have left I have been saving up especially for you. Now grab your bottle, put your feet up, mute Mr. Comey if you haven’t already and just listen to me. OK? Will you do that?

YOU (taking a big swig of wine)  
Yeah, I can. I’m good.

JANET  
Just relax on your couch or wherever while I tell you a little story. And don’t interrupt me. OK?

YOU  
OK.

JANET  
Once upon a time, in the magical land of Baltimore, there lived a foxy bitch named Janet.

YOU  
[ _burst out laughing_ ]

JANET  
Janet had an older sister named Farrah and Farrah was a foxy bitch too. Now, being of almost identical height and weight, these sexy sisters liked to split the cost of very expensive things like…clothes! Dresses especially, but sometimes suits and sweaters and those long fancy winter coats you need to attend long fancy winter parties.

YOU  
Hey I gave you the Versace, don’t you even. I took it to work and you picked it up. You had it in time for that thing you were going to, the…I don’t know, I don’t remember what it was. But you had it in time.

JANET  
Shhhh—hey, what’d I just say about interrupting? You are messing with my narrative flow.

YOU  
Sorry.

JANET  
These foxylicious sisters shared a beautiful gray Versace cashmere coat, and Farrah had temporary custody of it. Which Janet was one hundred percent cool with. It looked smashing, went perfectly with Farrah’s amazing dress, and Janet didn’t need the coat until the middle of the month, after all.

YOU  
Exactly, and Janet got the coat in plenty of time.

JANET  
Yes, she did. And so all was well in the foxy sister kingdom. Calm and tranquil. No wars were declared. But there was something that Farrah didn’t know.

YOU  
Oh?

JANET  
The weekend before Janet’s very fancy dinner party, Janet’s youngest daughter was staying at a friend’s house in McLean. At least that’s what the daughter in question had told Janet—turns out that while she was in McLean, it wasn’t at her friend’s house. Instead, she and the friend she was supposed to be staying with were drinking a whole bunch of beer at the conveniently parent-free home of yet another friend.

YOU (trying not to laugh)  
Oh my God, you never told me this story. Why didn’t you ever tell me this story? Jeez, she’s not even fifteen yet. Jason must’ve flipped.

JANET  
Yes, Janet knows this. And yes, Jason flipped. He flopped, veins bulged out of his forehead, it was terrifying. Naturally, Janet was appropriately horrified, and she’s assuring you now that the child in question is still enduring the strictest of punishments.

YOU  
Ouch.

JANET  
It’s a pain well-earned. Anyway. The original friend’s parents caught the both of them trying to sneak back into the house around midnight. Catching them was simple dimple, really, as they were both very loud and falling-down drunk. This resulted in Original Friend’s Mom picking up the phone and calling Janet at a unbelievably stupid hour of the morning.

YOU  
Oh boy.

JANET  
The next step involved Janet getting into her car and driving to McLean at an even stupider hour of the morning. Now—and you’ll understand this—Janet, she was frothing mad. Feather fuckin white, as Dad would say. So by the time she got to McLean, Janet was wide-fucking-awake. She had rarely experienced this level of wakefulness at one o’clock in the morning. Like Starbucks should figure out a way to bottle this shit. Pure distilled mom-rage. It could power the eastern seaboard for the next hundred years, at least.

YOU  
Yeah I can imagine.

JANET  
In the aggressive clarity of her burning rage, she feared committing actual bodily harm upon sight of her precious womb-fruit, so she thought…I need to take a breath. So she thought…well now, my sister lives just over the McLean line. She thought…I’ve got a key to Farrah’s place, I’m the one who usually feeds Princess Christophine while she’s off doing her fancy FBI business, I can just sorta creep in while she’s sleeping and pick up the Versace while I’m out here.

YOU  
You went to my house in the middle of the night?

JANET  
So Janet drives the extra few miles to Farrah’s house. She slows it way down, creeps up the long driveway like a serial killer and—wow! Suddenly there’s this big weird Escalade blocking her way. Like, can Escalade Owner even park properly because there’s no room left for Janet to jam in her petite little Mazda. And so Janet sits there, with her headlights off and her motor running, and she’s thinking…why is there a big weird Escalade in my sister’s driveway? On the away-from-the-road side? At one-twenty a.m.?

YOU  
[ _let out a slow-blown breath_ ]

JANET  
There are no lights on in the house, so Janet gets out of the car. She walks around. She thought if there was a light on she could maybe knock because that would mean everyone’s awake. While she’s casing the joint like a freaky freak from a Thomas Harris novel, Janet happens to notice that Farrah’s car isn’t parked in its preferred place. Like maybe it was making room on the other side of the house for Big Weird Escalade.

YOU (murmuring)  
Mother of God.

JANET  
And Janet was like…now that is a fuckin mystery.

YOU (in the calmest voice)  
What did you do?

JANET  
Now…unlike some people in this story, Janet does not work for the FBI. She’s just another child protective social worker, toiling diligently away for the state of Maryland.

YOU (with a single sharp disbelief breath)  
Tell me you didn’t.

JANET  
But even a lowly DHS worker has a secret superpower. It ain’t government secrets, it’s not flashy, it’s not sexy, but access to the DMV database is nothing to sneeze at.

YOU  
Jesus fuck you ran the plates.

JANET  
Jesus fuck I ran the plates.

YOU  
Oh my God.

JANET  
You sound like you might puke.

YOU  
I might puke.

JANET  
Put me down, then. Go get a can. I can wait.

The can tucks its edges beneath your sweat-slimed fingers & you lunge between spread knees, faceplant in the waste can; your stomach balls up into a tight hard knot. Your throat convulses, sends wine & old pizza shooting out. Its wet arrival & the acrid stink of deconstructed wine are enough to make everything inside you lurch toward the roof of your mouth.

You cough. Spit up long strings of purple puke.

You sit back, heart thud trapped in your ears & punching you in the ribs. You grab a tissue. Close your eyes. Wipe your mouth. Catch your breath.

JANET  
How’re your cookies?

YOU  
Why did you have to run the plates? Jesus God Janet couldn’t you have just, oh I don’t know…asked me? Like a normal person?

JANET  
Yeah, I know. I’m nosy and I love you. I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t the greatest thing I’ve ever done, OK?

YOU  
No, it’s not OK. You invaded my privacy—you invaded his privacy—all because you couldn’t just ask me about a car in my driveway.

JANET  
Would you have told me the truth?

YOU  
[ _long shaky exhale_ ]

JANET  
I didn’t think so. But I might’ve known anyway, I mean—come on, girl. Let’s not pretend you didn’t talk about the wonderful Mr. Comey just a little too much warmth. And to be real honest with you, I’ll cop to not even thinking of that until much much later. You wanna know what the real giveaway was?

YOU  
You must be real proud of yourself.

JANET  
I knew something was up when you started wearing Louboutins to work. With skirts. That showed your knees.

YOU  
My shoes. My hemlines. Wow. That’s some…A-plus investigative work there, sis.

JANET  
Like every day. In winter. And that red lipstick, too. What is it? Russian Red? Bone Me Red?

YOU  
[ _silence_ ]

JANET  
You’re pretty good but you’re not as good as you think you are. Your poker face really isn’t that epic, you know. Not to me.

YOU  
So did you go and run your mouth at everyone else, too? Is that why people have been calling me all day and wanting to know how I am? Wow. I just…you cannot even begin to imagine how embarrassed I am right now. How humiliating.

JANET  
Calm down—

YOU  
Calm my tits, right? You’re always like that. Oh Farrah, just calm your tits. Chill out. Well fuck you and fuck my tits. My tits are not calm. No other part of me is either, and that is my right.

JANET  
I bet your anger orgasm feels really good.

YOU (snarling)  
Oh go fuck yourself.

JANET  
Look I know riding your righteous high horse is rubbing you in all the right places, but…seriously sweetie, no snark intended, I just wanna know. Would you have told me the truth? If I had asked you?

YOU  
No.

JANET  
Then what are you mad at?

YOU  
It’s myself, right? I’m mad at myself. Of course I am. Right? Is that where you’re going with this? OK then! Which case study did you mine that bit of wisdom out of?

JANET  
Why out of every caseworker’s very first case study, dear sister. Of course. That overrated clusterfuck called family.

YOU  
Really? That’s what you’ve got?

JANET  
Are you mad at yourself?

YOU  
Of course I am!

JANET  
Are you mad at him?

YOU  
Of course I am!

JANET  
Are you mad at me?

YOU  
Well, I am now.

JANET (chuckling & soft-voiced)  
Have you talked to him?

YOU  
No.

JANET  
Are you going to?

YOU  
You know, Mom asked me that same question.

JANET  
Hold on, I didn’t say anything to anyone. I can hear you filling your lungs with jet fuel, so breathe it out. Calm down. No one means Mom, too. And Ziz and Lena and Mimi. No one means no one. There are no exceptions there.

YOU  
You didn’t even tell Jason?

JANET  
Cross my heart not even him, even though it hurt me to keep it to myself. Like real suffering. Many were the nights where I longed to roll over in bed, put my lips to his ear and whisper oh Jason, my oldest sister is fucking her boss. What should I do.

YOU  
[ _start laughing & cover your mouth but even with the microphone covered Janet knows that sound too well_]

JANET (laughing too)  
Hey! You can laugh at me all you want, but I’m serious. I worried. I ruminated. Time went on and you didn’t say anything to anyone which isn’t much like you at all. I figured you’d fess up to me, eventually. Even if you didn’t to anyone else. Of course, now everyone here knows the ending. But I’m the only one who knows there was a beginning, too. That’s weird. I can’t lie.

YOU  
No, I don’t want you to.

JANET (heaving a huge & exhausted sigh)  
So…how are you holding up?

YOU  
I’m…drunk.

JANET  
I know you’re drunk. We covered that already, but thanks for confirming. You know how much I savor being right.

YOU  
Yeah, I know.

JANET  
So how drunk is drunk?

YOU  
Two-thirds of a bottle drunk, but it’s on top of a nice big starchy fatty meal.

JANET  
So percentages deducted for metabolic enhancement, gotcha.

YOU  
I am watching it. The hearing. Well…I was. I paused it.

JANET  
How does it feel?

YOU  
Horrible. It feels horrible. Everything about today has been horrible.

JANET  
You can do better than that, I know it. Come on. Don’t hold back. Punch me in the mouth with some poetics.

YOU  
[laughing]

JANET  
No, I mean it. Tell me how you really feel.

YOU (the strength in your voice unraveling)  
He looks…tired. He looks…nervous. He looks worn out, and I…don’t like it at all.

JANET  
So why’d you leave him?

YOU  
He’s got a wife, Janet. Like—a long-term one, with a bunch of children. Besides, how do you know I left him? Maybe he left me.

JANET  
Well, there is the matter of physical distance. As in time zones. So technically you left him, even if you didn’t _leave him_ leave him. Which I feel comfortable concluding that you did—leave him, I mean—since there are still time zones between you and you haven’t called him today. Also, you’re not angry enough to have been dumped. I know angry Farrah, and you aren’t her. If he’d dumped you, you’d stubbornly still be here and still wearing all your sexiest suits to your office and trying not to snarl and stick your chin out at work.

YOU  
Aren’t you a wiseass.

JANET  
Yeah, completely. A wiseass who knows you. Am I wrong?

YOU  
No, of course you’re not.

JANET  
So are you gonna answer that question for real this time?

YOU  
His wife is real, Janet.

JANET  
I believe that, I do. But unless I am mistaken, her super real reality-type fleshly flesh existence wasn’t enough to keep him out of your bedroom at one a.m. on a Saturday night.

YOU  
No, I guess it wasn’t.

JANET  
You know it wasn’t.

YOU  
All right, all right.

JANET  
That’s the time I know about, but I feel like there were probably other times too.

YOU  
There were other times.

JANET  
Maybe even a lot of them.

YOU  
Maybe.

JANET  
Here’s where I’m going to hang a wild left onto Logic Road because I know you’re abundantly cursed with the stuff.

YOU(chuckling)  
It’ll only hurt for a minute, I promise.

JANET  
Logic is gross and overused and far too trusted by everyone but—but I know you love it, OK? So don’t you laugh at my pitiful attempts. I’m not very good at this.

YOU  
Cross my heart, I won’t.

JANET  
I’m going to have to logic my way around this through you, kinda of a What Would Farrah Do mental exercise because the rest of us have debated for years whether or not you actually possess a silly-slash-spontaneous bone. My money’s on no, for the record.

YOU (mumbling & grinning)  
Oh fuck you.

JANET  
Which is how I come to the idea that Mr. Comey probably isn’t a Lothario type?

YOU  
[ _snort & burst out laughing; you try to tamp down your ribs but it’s too late: laughing breaks up into giggling, which shakes your whole body & makes your head pulse like a sullen wound_]

JANET  
I am going to go ahead and interpret those ridiculous snorting noises as a primitive giggle-dialect for hell no.

YOU  
I don’t—I c-can’t—no, just…yeah, that’s a big hell no.

JANET  
You think he’s ever cheated before?

YOU  
He said he hadn’t.

JANET  
That’s not what I asked you, Farrah Jean.

YOU  
[ _sigh_ ]

JANET  
Do I need to remind you that you worked for the FBI for sixteen years while he only worked there for four?

YOU  
No. Yes. I don’t know. Maybe.

JANET  
Consider yourself reminded, then. I wanna know what you think, not what he said. Because of course that’s what he said. I don’t care what he said. They all say the same thing.

YOU  
Yeah, I know.

JANET  
So?

YOU  
I think…I think the desire to cheat has occurred before, but not often. I also think that in the past, when it did occur, it did not occur strongly enough to initiate any action on his part.

JANET (clapping & whistling)  
There’s my girl. Welcome back, FBI Intelligence Analyst Farrah Barnes.

YOU  
Fuck you.

JANET  
I’m serious. I know you analyzed the shit out of this situation before you ever stepped foot in it.

YOU  
Logic only goes so far and I think you’re giving me too much credit. I can get all swept up in things too, you know. I do have feelings.

JANET  
Yeah, I know. You’re not the kind of woman who fucks married men.

YOU  
I have never fucked a married man, not to my knowledge—well. [c _learing your throat_ ] I never had, anyway. I guess that’s not exactly true anymore.

JANET  
That’s definitely not at all true anymore.

YOU  
Rub it in a little more. Go right ahead. I’ll wait.

JANET  
To paraphrase our great goddess of truth and beauty—I am talking about Beyoncé, of course—you are not yourself, lately you’re damn foolish. You don't do this.

YOU  
Oh you did not.

JANET (cackling)  
What?

YOU  
You did not just drop Crazy In Love lyrics into this conversation.

JANET  
Maybe I did.

YOU  
Those are fighting words.

JANET  
You wanna fight me? Let’s go! I mean you’ll kick my ass, you’ve got advantages, but this is worth an ass-kicking. You’re not crying anymore. You’ve forgotten to drink. So I will cheerfully take one for the team.

YOU  
I love you, you know.

JANET  
I know. I miss you, you know.

YOU  
I know. I miss you too.

JANET  
When are you gonna come home, Farrah? I bet you could even get your job back if you smiled and asked real nice.

YOU  
I know I could, I’ve gotten word from a couple people, but— [ _sigh_ ]. I’m just like—can I? Does everybody know? If I go back, are people gonna talk?

JANET  
Since it’s the Federal Bureau of INVESTIGATION, I think that’s a pretty good bet. The talking part, I mean. I’m sure there are rumors. There are always rumors. They may not even be right, but you did blow out of there pretty quick, it’s not like you, so yeah there are people busy doing the math. Like your actual friends. Since rumors are like 90% BS half the time, it’s probably wrong math. I do know someone who’s married to a lady in the criminal division, though. I could ask them.

YOU  
No! Oh my God!

JANET  
I’m just kidding. [ _chuckles_ ] Well, sort of. A little. Maybe not at all. I mean—I would ask.

YOU  
Don’t you even.

JANET  
I won’t, I won’t. I just like watching you clutch your pearls. It’s always such a good time.

YOU  
Go to bed, asshole.

JANET  
I absolutely should. I have a meeting first thing and will likely end up entering it in full zombie mode.

YOU  
Ease off the human flesh, kiddo. [ _laughing_ ] You’ll make us all look bad.

JANET  
I think you should call him. Not tonight obviously, it’s too late for that, but sometime soon.

YOU  
No. I’m—I am trying to do the right thing, and calling him is the wrong thing. I mean…it is most definitely the wrong thing.

JANET  
But you’ve done so many wrong things already, though. Maybe a lot of times. What’s one more thing?

YOU  
Well one, it’s reopening a wound—

JANET (laughing)  
Oh look at you, faking it on this phone right now. That wound isn’t closed. I cannot believe you just uttered that crap with a straight face.

YOU  
And two, well…it’s sending an incorrect message. It would make certain doors look like they’re still open.

JANET  
That’s because they are still open.

YOU  
No they’re not. Well—maybe. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, though—they need to look like they’re closed whether they are or not. And they will be, when I refuse to open them long enough.

JANET  
You should know that you’re not fooling me.

YOU  
What is that supposed to mean?

JANET  
It means that I’m still your sister and I still know when you’re bullshitting. Or attempting to, because you suck at it so hard. But—you know, like that thing you said earlier regarding your calamity-ridden mammaries, that’s your right. You are free to bullshit yourself and to make feeble attempts at bullshitting me. And I am free to call it out for what it is.

YOU  
I’m not bullshitting you, I’m—I want to do the right thing, and the right thing involves me being far away. It involves me letting things go.

JANET  
And how do you think he feels?

YOU  
I don’t know.

JANET  
Yes you do.

YOU  
No. I don’t.

JANET  
What did he say to you when you handed over your letter of resignation?

YOU  
I didn’t hand it to him, I handed it to my division chief.

JANET  
OK then, so what did he say when he found out?

YOU  
He asked me not to.

JANET  
I bet.

YOU  
It wasn’t like that.

JANET  
OK so maybe that’s the wrong question, then.

YOU  
[ _snort_ ]

JANET  
How did he look when he asked you not to?

YOU  
I don’t know.

JANET  
What do you mean you don’t know?

YOU  
I mean that it was a conversation that happened on the phone.

JANET  
You didn’t discuss it face-to-face?

YOU  
No.

JANET  
Wow, that’s rude.

YOU  
Mind your fucking business and don’t judge me, OK? I’m not in the mood.

JANET  
OK, well—how did he sound, then? Was it kinda like you made a little cut in his belly and started just sorta tugging out little wet loops of intestine?

YOU  
That’s gross, Janet. And extra. Even for you.

JANET  
It is really gross. It’s also startling because no one ever thinks it’ll really happen. Not to them, anyway. It’s one of those punishments that sorta floats outside the average imagination because that kind of casual brutality is so difficult to accept. It’s also really painful. Excruciating, in fact. Excruciating is a better word for it.

YOU  
I don’t want to talk about this with you anymore because quite honestly it’s none of your business and it never would’ve been if you hadn’t spied on me and run those plates. I never had any intention of talking to anyone about any of it, because it was a mistake. Maybe not the biggest mistake I ever made, but it’s in the top three.

JANET  
So that’s a yes, then.

YOU  
God you’re such an asshole. [ _your eyes fill with water & your voice thickens with snot_] And right now I really hate you for it.

JANET  
Did you cry?

YOU (with a hissing vehemence)  
Of course I did.

JANET  
Did he?

YOU (snarling)  
This conversation is over.

JANET (quietly)  
Whoa, OK.

YOU  
Fuck you, and fuck your questions too.

JANET  
I’m sorry. [ _her voice gets small_ ] Don’t be mad.

YOU  
You’re right, I—I don’t want to be here. I didn’t want to leave, but I’ve got no willpower. I’m…I’m weak. [ _sigh_ ]

JANET  
[ _offers silence, stacks it with rhythms of breath_ ]

YOU  
If I had stayed, I wouldn’t have stopped. And I needed to stop. I needed to. It was—wrong, everything about it was wrong, it wasn’t going to end up anywhere good, not for anyone. All I had to look forward to was scandal and professional disaster and—and—

JANET (so soft it’s just louder than a single breath)  
Heartbreak?

YOU  
Abandonment.

JANET  
I’m gonna say something and you’re probably going to screech at me for it, but I don’t care. What the hell. I’m into living dangerously.

YOU  
What—

JANET  
Wanting to be with someone you love isn’t wrong.

YOU  
But—

JANET  
And it’s very hard to resist that when it’s so freely offered, regardless of the circumstances.

YOU  
I d—

JANET  
For love is strong as death and jealousy is cruel as the grave.

YOU (with a collapsing exhale)  
Did you just quote the song of songs at me?

JANET  
Maybe.

YOU  
Wow, look at you go.

JANET  
It’s true, though. Look—I don’t care about what’s right or wrong. What I care about is how you feel. It’s causing you so much pain to be away from the people you love. It’s not logical, I know. I don’t—[ _voice breaks, crumbles into soft & restrained weeping_]—well, I don’t give too much of a shit about what the right thing is. Not right now. I’m not sure there is a right thing. But I know it’s wrong for you to be this miserable.

YOU (crying)  
I don’t know if I can. I have ruined everything about my life. I don’t even know who I am anymore. Everything just—hurts so much, all the time. I can’t make it stop, I thought leaving would make it stop but—

JANET  
You think you’re the only one who ever had an affair? You think you’re the only one who ever fucked her boss? That doesn’t make you a different person. You’re still you. You are not just your actions or your behavior and we will all still love you. I can’t believe I have to tell you that. Did you really think I would think less of you?

YOU  
You sound like Mom.

JANET  
Of course I do. We all end up becoming our mothers.

YOU (chuckling & sniffling)  
Well, not all of us.

JANET  
Oh believe me, your time will come.


	26. dear sir (after the hearing)

Dear Sir,

  
FUCK YOU

fuck your big soft hand with its elegant match fingers

stick it in a hole somewhere & show me pictures.

fuck you.

shoulda kept em to yourself but I guess it doesn’t matter at least not at the surface nor past the sky & definitely not in the “real” world because what are the consequences?

just another stupid girl,

a cuntmonster w/a parched throat.

just a debased hole drooling somewhere, a bloody fruit womb gnashing tempest in a teapot—I can hear you somewhere

crying out

what are you, a fucking prom queen? can’t you laugh like a real woman? don’t your knees care for each other? what are those fingers doing? can’t you just ignore yourself?

suddenly everything’s so delicate, prissy even. it’s so quaint, isn’t it? (& i know it’s not really you crying out anywhere it’s just the dumb part of my mind making shit up) but i will have you know that NO ONE FUCKING CARES about the state of a woman’s bones. NO ONE FUCKING CARES about oceans of blood charred to ash in order to sheath a skeleton in iron

& i am now a lightning rod.

this is a permanent change

& all I have to do is think of you to rumble, deafened, inside a room of thunder.

even now, right this minute, i’ve got tiny wispy hairs crackling up the back of my neck

& this strike is gonna HURT LIKE FUCK.

it comes up from the ground, you know. lightning does. it’s the granddaddy of what happens when socks + carpet-friction + something metal = a sharp but tiny finger-pop. this kinda load jumps cloudward, spares not a single solitary thought about the kind of shit we all take for granted & i’m two thousand six hundred thirty-three miles away just sitting here, just going like…look at you, flinging all that electricity around, running roughshod over wild volts. grasp & wrestle them into submission

taking advantage of that trust but maybe you just don’t know any better.

& maybe that’s BULLSHIT.

maybe

the truth is

i’d still let you stick those fingers up my hole & make my pussy drool. make her gag even. she’s all ready to give up a rippling wet that squeezes & trembles at the same time. that feels so good, doesn’t it?

truth is i still sometimes

(when I’m deaf, when my hair is on fire, when the rumbling is too much)

use my own fingers to scratch up a little heat. it’s smokeless compared to what you can do but then again it’s just me by my lonesome sitting up against a door & marking the depths of my own floodwaters. it’s what I do when I catch myself thinking too far into everything that has happened

(& let me tell you that i spend a lot of time fingering myself in the kitchen)

& can I forgive you for that—i don’t even know—i guess the jury’s still deliberating  
.  
.  
.  
[ _there’s one ragged tearsplotch on this sheet of paper—it’s in the bottom left corner & hazes the blue lines but does not interfere with the ink_]  
.  
.  
.  
o.k. so

here, have a newsflash:

  
THE TRUTH IS

I STILL WANT YOU just

  
in case

 

 

 

 

you

haven’t

noticed

* * *

  
I am so fucking ridiculous

 

                Farrah J. Barnes

                FBI WASHOUT-IN-EXILE


	27. a word for

I want to practice walking away—I’m still not good at it. These muscles still won’t accept labor without a turn and turn about, without dull disgruntled pain dancing in long after the work is done.

Movement is such a simple pleasure. The rocking in the bones. The breeze in the lungs. Loosened hands swinging toward something & blood-tides rising in the skin but shallow, their undertows surrendering to a gentle wind.

& there’s the beach.

There’s that.

It’s nothing for me to leave my house. To seek out a sand cradle. In a world that craves demarcation, there’s always that line between water & land; locked in weird worship with those places that won’t be just one thing or another, I feel that draw embedded in my human body: a memory of waves, the whispered call to rhythm. Their nascent curl inside my blood.

_You tell yourself that_. My feet weave a distance between my back  & my house. My front sways at the ocean. _You tell yourself a lot of things_.

Well.

Here are some of the things I could not tell my sister.

I’ll make it a list.

1\. There’s no word for the light that climbs through your bedroom window in the early morning & takes up the warmth of wooden floors, skips merrily over the hills & valleys of disturbed bedclothes to run smack into the sleeping face of a man who has no business still being there. I remember a brief & bitter battle with color—for it seemed the easiest route—but it shunned me. Shades of blue refused any weight of responsibility & what purple tones were there gave me an exquisite side-eye (like the queens of shade that they are). Yellow and orange peeked in, flew round and round rims of glass but—having too much in common with fire, which is to say being easily startled & high-strung—they took one glance & committed a prompt desertion.

2\. If there’s a word for when your bones make a decision to kiss their fat-wrappings goodbye, for when your organs enter weightlessness, for when the nerve-fuzz farthest from your brainstem hums out a constant low-grade honeyed warning—if such a word could exist—it looks like a face leaving sleep behind to look at you like maybe you’re a rune yourself, or a double-lungful of air, or that first bit of sugar hitting the blood after a long subliminal stretch of fading.

3\. There are plenty of words for the kind of sex that happens without words. In the still-warm & rumpled minutes after waking. Under the cling of dream. Proximity eating you up like a drug. Inside a newborn light far too fragile to align itself with any sort of hue.

4\. untranslated sighs/ sleep-salted breath/ rebellious wet/ reoriented skin/ staking a claim in the drumming of your own heart/ the way fingers taste the moment they enter your mouth/ a heat-laden ache displaced by the thrust of gravity/ the rocking/ the soothing/ a gallop of spooked hips/ & groans hitting one another/ & grappling/ attempting conception/ such strong breaths a new weapon/ causing beautiful wreckage/ loaded down with all the blueprints of speech

5\. an unfocused squadron of emotion that—while shackled & bludgeoning—stampedes away from all your attempts to learn it, to categorize; it snubs your yen for dissection. an unfocused squadron of emotion that—while mercurial & sneaky—makes itself a blind & ambushes you on your path to the ecstatic state.

6\. the dread of knowing that you have just traded a pound of self for silver & gambled it on a void. a slick void, trembling somewhere. hiding. the dread of papering over a newly sliced entrance to that void with all the sinister embroidery your imagination is capable of wreaking upon whole cloth. one word for that is _helplessness_. another word for that is _devotion_.

7\. i’m in trouble/ shit/ fuck dammit/ jesus/ what do i do/ how do i bear this/ my heart just keeps on trance dancing/ & it won’t stop/ & i won’t stop/ it just won’t/ & i am in so much goddamned trouble

8\. If there’s a word for the shape of a very long spine when its forced by its owner to walk out the door, I don’t want to know it.

9\. If there’s a word for the kind of constricted silence he left me stranded in, I don’t want to know it.

10\. If there’s a word for separating specific meanings—the unruly ones, the cozening ones, the ones with acid breath and razor eyes—away from your calmest tones, I don’t want to know it.

Waves happen on the water, small ones. Their breaking like a sound of sleep. Cold sand creeps into my sandals. Grains dig into my soft pulse of veins.

The sky over me, she is purple. Endless. She recedes from the land to take cover under a true darkness. A city sky like this one, clinging to the verge, wants nothing to do with stars; she’ll only flirt with what cosmos is happening over water. The few I can see struggle with the fog, refuse to glint.

My swollen nose smells fermented salt. My skin accepts the ocean’s water-logged sigh. I watch streetlight deform across the surface of the water.

Because most of me has calmed into a spent state, I look up and down the waterline & think up some words for beach: shingle, strand, waterfront. The coast. A threshold. Crossroads. No-man’s land. Twilight place. Ring of fire. Changeling territory. Maddening yet indifferent siren to dolphins & whales, beguiling their sonar until they arc through rolling water & thrust themselves toward a desperate suicide.

_That’s extra, Farrah_. I hug myself. _Even for you_.

My feet dig pungent wounds into the sand. Distant, a long cold plume of fog drifts in slow slide, rides expensive roofs back down into the waiting embrace of a tranquilized sea. My eyes roam through layers of its artificial darkness.

I think… _this is a leaving that’s much easier_.

It’s nothing to leave behind a house that’s built for an endless cycle of abandonment & reception. Just a box, a roof, a mouth gaping for anyone to fly into. To forage between the boards for scraps & slap together someone else’s idea of a life.

I think… _the one allure of it is how close it is to nowhere—to no-man’s land, the threshold between then & the promise of changeling territory_.

My mouth tastes purple & sour.

I keep walking.


	28. like a girl

I collapse into a folded self, my head dull with too much weight & my brain soft. My sight flickers. My stomach grumbles. I watch the water until the passing of time feels like nothing.

My phone buzzes up against my thigh. I pull my phone out of a dress pocket, unlock the screen. The glare of it doubles up. I squint.

[Jon] Hey

My head shakes. I blow out a breath. My eyebrows lift.

[Jon] U still up?

“Breaking news,” I mutter, tapping the screen.

[Me] Breaking news! Guess what! It’s not that late! On the west coast!  
[Jon] No shit! I can do all the maths! & I know abt the time zones! 4realz!

I laugh. The sound of it startles me.

[Me] You sure about that? Because you don’t seem sure?  
[Jon] I am tho! All! These! Exclamation! Marks! Make! It! True!

My cheeks hurt. I giggle & my belly loosens.

[Jon] So! Tweets! Our! President!  
[Me] OMG STOP IT

Laughter shocks the ambient beach sounds out of my ears, drives back a low hum of waves.

[Jon] Breaking news! I am! Also! On! The! West! Coast!  
[Me] STAWWWWP omg

My overwrought midsection shakes. A pang happens deep up each nostril. My arid eyes turn damp.

[Jon] U rocking back & forth & doing that screechy laff yet?  
[Me] Fucku

I blot my eyes with a sweater cuff. I gigglesnort, give the screen the bird.

[Jon] I’m @my mom’s in Santa Monica, her b-day is tomorrow  
[Me] I’m in Venice, sitting on the beach just below the high tide line  
[Jon] Just hanging out w/the smell of dead seaweed & motor oil  
[Me] LOL yeah that’s a good summary of how things are

When I think of Jonathan, the first image to enter my head is always him in a black vicuña tuxedo, its cut precise as geometry, the thin shirt beneath a field of woven snow, lone star cufflinks, his silk bow-tie knotted like an afterthought; I watch the foundations of his body move beneath all that Texas daddy oil money like a well-loved animal, a cosseted engine, an elegant concert built out of joint and flex.

It’s always my first image, no matter what. Context never matters. When he comes into my head he struts, his spine as straight as his teeth, white America’s most coveted aesthetic: shoulders just wide enough to hold good musculature, waist just narrow enough to narrate his diligently maintained fitness level, his wrists hewn from thick bone, his capable fingers, those spring-wound ankles, a pair of thighs just long enough to hold those designer pants the intended way.

[Jon] The fog made u cold yet?  
[Me] Not yet but the fog’s still rolling in  
[Jon] U wanna head home soon & get warm?

This image—the tuxedo, his meticulous salt-and-pepper hair, his cultivated crow’s feet, the neatness of his half-secret & barely slanted smile—always summons out of memory a line I read in a book: _would my momentum do what it does with drunk successful women, catapult me toward some man who would come inside me, an American six-footer maybe_

& on the heels of that thought always runs another; hasty, it trips over itself, shows up accompanied by the feel of a wry smile just before it happens. Carried on a solemn mouth-twitch, a brief tender hollowness nudges the inside of my chest: _yep, that’s Jonathan Everett Scott—that west coast & best coast boy, the high-rise champagne soirée’s quintessential American six-footer_

[Me] Is that a poorly-executed double entendre?  
[Jon] Put yr claws away, JFC

 _I mean…Jesus_. I stare into the dark, toward where a horizon would be. _He works a room like a goddamned Sade song_.

[Me] OK, just don’t ask me if I watched the hearing  
[Jon] OK, I won’t  
[Me] Why? Bored w/Mom already?  
[Jon] Wow, u so nasty tonight. Jeez  
[Me] Sorry, just…y’know, tired  
[Jon] OK fine. So maybe I am a little bit bored  
[Me] LOL  
[Jon] Can I call u?

I dig earbuds out of my dress pocket. I plug them in.

[Me] OK

The text screen disappears, fills up with a photo of him grinning from inside CNN’s hair & makeup room.

“Hello?”

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Is it a thick sweater?”

“It’s a chunky cable knit that’s so thick it’s like wearing a blanket.”

He chuckles. “Perfect.”

“So far, yeah.” I look down at its ribbed hem. “It is fulfilling all my expectations.”

“Did you make it?”

“I did, actually.” I move wisps of hair behind one ear. “Last year.”

“How are you, Farrah?”

“I’m…I’ve been better.” I let out a sigh. “But I’ll be OK.”

“Is the job working for you?”

“You were right.” I chuckle. “I do kinda hate it.”

“Yeah.” He laughs. “Those lips of yours were not made for kissing celebrity ass.”

“I manage, I do.” I giggle. “I can sweet talk like everyone else but I limp through it most days.”

“So.” His voice warms. ‘’You coming back?”

I arrange and rearrange the skirt of my dress. “I am.”

“Are you ever gonna tell me why you left DC?”

“I’ll tell you, if you want to know.”

“I am dying to know, and you know I’m dying to know.” He chuckles. “So can this coy bullshit, yeah?”

“Patrice Comey came to my house.”

“Uh…” There’s a brief silence. “I feel like maybe I’m missing something?”

“I don’t think you’re missing anything.”

“Now…are we talking about the wife of James B. Comey, as in the shining star of today’s widely debated and disseminated testimony?”

“Yes.”

“OK?”

“Well…she went to Julie’s house first, actually. It’s a little funny, I guess, because—”

“She’s your backyard neighbor and your driveways overlap.” His voice turns wry. “Or I guess they probably look that way—”

“On a GPS readout.”

There’s a pause. “Yeah.”

“It happened, uh…on the twenty-seventh of April.” I pull in a breath, shoot it out. “It was in the morning, very early in the morning.”

“Were you on your way back from your run?”

“No, it was earlier than that. I was on my way down the driveway.”

“That’s early.”

“It is.”

“You, uh…should know that I’m starting to draw certain conclusions, here.”

“You are good at that.”

“So…what’s the deal, here? What are you saying? Are you sure you want to tell me this story?”

“I’m not, but…I think I should.”

“I guess it feels like someone has to hear it.”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“OK. OK. I’ll listen.”

“She’d parked so it half-blocked the driveway. When she saw me, she got out of her car. I saw her and…I’d seen her before, but it had been years really, so at first I was just like—what the hell is this. Then she opened her mouth, and right at that moment, I was like…of course. Of course it is.”

“Right.”

“So she started to walk toward me, met me halfway up the driveway and I’m like…big smile, you know, hi. Nice morning out here. What can I do for you, is there something I can help you with. You know how that goes.”

His voice remains neutral. “I do.”

“She’s watching my face and she goes… _you’re_ Farrah. And she’s got this expression on her face, like…I don’t know, I’m not sure I can describe it, but there’s a…a kind of fragility. And she says it like that, like I just did: _you’re_ Farrah. It wasn’t accusatory, though.”

“So she didn’t remember you, then. From whenever you met her before.”

“No, I…I guess not?”

“That’s surprising. You aren’t exactly forgettable.”

“Oh stop it.”

“No, I mean it. I’m being serious. You’re a head-turner and it sounds to me—by the way you’re describing this interaction—that perhaps she didn’t know that.”

“God, I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t. It was a long time ago, it was…back at the beginning of his tenure, I barely remember it. I think I shook her hand. But it might’ve been his oldest daughter’s hand.”

“You really didn’t think of that.”

“No.” The thought flusters me. “I didn’t.”

“I mean…you’re really beautiful. And _tall_.”

“Can we not?”

“OK, OK. I’ll let it go. Please continue.”

“So of course I felt trapped and I kept trying to smile around that, to put on a pleasant face. So I said…yeah, I’m Farrah Barnes. This is my house. And she goes…you work for the FBI. I nod and say yes, I tell her that I’ve been an intelligence analyst for sixteen years. And then she smiled. Like, really smiled. And it was terrible because there was so much relief in it. She said…yes, that’s exactly what your neighbor said. She was in such a huge rush to be wrong.”

“Did she find a route to your house on his GPS?”

“Yeah, basically.”

“That’s I thought.”

“She was trying to keep it light, trying to chuckle it off—she was like, so I got curious and followed this route I found on my husband’s GPS and ended up at your neighbor’s house by mistake, she’s very pleasant but I’m sure she thinks I’m a total nutcase, hahaha. But there’s that thing with the driveways.”

“—and you were like yeah, there is. That thing with the driveways.”

“Yeah.”

“OK.”

“So she kinda watches me for a moment and it hits me: she’s waiting for me to explain. She wants an explanation.”

“Yep.”

“So I…make one up. I conjure up this fairytale about a lunch meeting and accidentally leaving some folders in his car. And as I’m telling her, I keep thinking—this is a crap story, I know it’s crap, and I keep thinking that I should’ve gone with my first urge and blamed it on gloves falling out of my pocket or something like that, but that’s too…I don’t know, intimate. Personal. And I was so busy trying to push this story far far away from anything personal. And then her _face_ , Jon. This carefully cultivated neutral cocktail pleasantries kind of look that she’d been wearing—and it was just like that, like a mask—it just…collapsed.”

Silence.

“It was terrible, I mean—for a couple seconds there she looked like a girl. A child. It didn’t last very long, she was good at papering over it with that big smile, but when I saw that brief grief-stricken look I knew he’d told her a completely different story.”

“Sure, I mean…first rule of Cheat Club is get your stories synced up.”

“Because you’d know, right?”

“It’s common sense, so calm down.”

“Fuck you.”

“Hey—look. I don’t wanna be that guy, but this is _not_ the time for the little homewrecking pot of Venice Beach to go kettle-shaming.”

“I am not a homewrecker! I didn’t wreck anything! I didn’t cheat on anyone! Jesus—when did this phone call turn into the fucking Jerry Springer show? And also, by the way, why does it have to be my fault? I didn’t make him do anything. So sick of this narrative getting trotted out every time a man decides to fuck a woman who isn’t his wife. So fucking sick.”

“It turned into the Jerry Springer show the moment you decided to tell me the story of how one day Mrs. Comey blocked your driveway at six o’clock in the morning so she could try and work out whether or not you were fucking her husband.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“No?”

“No!”

“Well… _were_ you fucking her husband?”

“You know what? Never mind.” I jump to my feet. “I’m sorry I told you.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Yes! Yes! All right? Yes! I was fucking him. Is that what you want to hear? Is that—is that what you’re looking for? Is that what you want me to say? Fine. I did it. I was doing it. I did it a _lot_.”

“OK, so…did you...” He gives a harsh sigh. “Did you know he was going to be in New York, then?” His voice gains an edge. “That night in March?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I don’t believe you,” he snaps.

“Fine.” I step onto concrete. “Whatever. Don’t. You go right ahead and believe whatever you want, I can’t stop you.”

“But that’s where you went, right? Off into the night? With him?”

“It wasn’t _like_ that!”

“Oh. OK. So it was _exactly_ like that, then. Because that’s what that answer means when it comes from you. That’s the person you are now.”

“Oh fuck you, Jonathan,” I sneer. “I refuse to accept this condescending crap from you. I won’t. How dare you find the audacity to fuck-shame me when everyone knows—and I mean _everyone_ —that you’ll fuck anything with a willing hole.”

He startle-laughs.

“What? Why is that funny? Though I guess I really shouldn’t be too surprised that you would think the active perpetration of a double standard is the absolute height of hilarity.”

“I can always tell when you’re really angry because your sentence structures go insane, like…baroque with rage. I mean, were all those ornamental clauses really necessary?”

I yank out my earbuds. I hang up on him.

[Jon] Yr magnificent  
[Me] I’m so not in the mood  
[Jon] U sure?  
[Me] Look, I’m going to tell you something  
[Jon] Is this gonna be more dispatches from the land of Jezebel, or…? Bcuz if yes, then no thnx  
[Me] Wow, it takes nothing to make you turn nasty. Nothing at all. I’m really sorry, that has to suck. I can’t imagine living with such a hair-trigger  
[Jon] I don’t want yr pity  
[Me] It’s not pity, you ass. What I’m trying to say is that I really wanted to have those feelings for you. I kept trying for a reason  
[Jon] Well I’m sorry u had to work so hard. If I’d known it was such a hardship 4 u, I would’ve backed off & left u alone  
[Me] I don’t mean it like that. You’re intelligent & sharp-witted. You’re hot as fuck & you’re great at dating, no fake. Dating is a skill  
[Me] & when you’re not being an insecure turdmouth you’re an exceptional conversationalist  
[Jon] Turdmouth? Really?  
[Me] Shut up & let me finish. What I’m saying is that there’s a reason you’re drowning in pussy  
[Jon] LMAO  
[Me] & while you’re a very sexy person, dumb animal body response doesn’t mean anything  
[Jon] It means u might feel good & I am v. interested in making u feel good  
[Me] I like you a great deal & would greatly enjoy fucking you, but I need more  
[Jon] & u could get more from someone else’s husband?  
[Me] Whether someone loves me isn’t the point, it’s about whether or not I have those feelings. I’d prefer it if they did, but you don’t always get what you want  
[Jon] So what yr saying is that it’s far better 2 have loved & lost then 2 have never loved at all  
[Me] LOL yes, Shakespeare  
[Jon] *bows*  
[Me] I want to have romantic feelings for you, but I just…don’t  
[Jon] Thank u 4 yr honesty, tho I wish u had been honest w/me sooner  
[Me] Fair enough. I respect you, you know, despite your regular lapses into turdspeak  
[Jon] TURDSPEAK  
[Me] That’s what it is  
[Jon] I hate to admit it, since yr aiming it at me and all, but it is pretty funny  
[Me] It’s colorful but it gets the job done  
[Jon] & I had no idea u had an inner femme fatale, that’s hot  
[Me] Is that like my inner goddess doing the cha-cha?  
[Jon] & fucku for bringing 50 shades of gray into this conversation, gross  
[Me] You laid the groundwork w/your inner femme fatale shit, so don’t cry at me  
[Jon] It’s a compliment! I must admit the idea is giving me certain mental images, tho  
[Me] Oh Lordy  
[Jon] *gasp* U did NOT JUST  
[Me] LMAO  
[Jon] Srsly HOW DARE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The line _would my momentum do what it does with drunk successful women, catapult me toward some man who would come inside me, an American six-footer maybe_ is quoted out of Lidia Yuknavitch's _The Small Backs of Children_.


	29. an empty sidewalk w/a too-big sweater

In the electric peach of a fogged-over California night. On an empty sidewalk w/echoing footfalls.

Cold air. Taste of salt.

[Me] Don’t worry, there aren’t any tapes  
[Jon] OMG CEASE & DESIST

There are sounds so common they skip past the front of your regard, snuggle up to the back burner & huddle there: engines at work, horns honking, wheels crunching on broken glass, ocean wind rattling through palm fronds, the constant murmuring haze of voices & music, doors opening & closing, street lights humming in every nighttime city everywhere on earth.

Or just one car window’s motor, humming all the way down.

I’m far too busy chortling. I am way too occupied w/feeling around for my next step. I’m sticking to the sidewalk & ambling myself in the homeward direction. I’ve got no reason for hurrying & engine noise fades out even faster than a window, especially in a concrete freeway city like Los Angeles; I glance at the edge of the sidewalk. I lift the phone closer to my face.

My chilled fingers hold the warmed-up screen. I smile.

[Me] I must inform you that YOU CANNOT MAKE ME

“You’re not shivering.”

My feet stop before the rest of my legs wake up to the sound of that voice & the result of that is a slanted knee-jiggle, a lurch in my hips; my eyes jolt off the screen, search for some kind of bearings.

“I’d say that’s an improvement.”

I stick my phone in my pocket. Make a face. Turn my head.

Jim looks at me. His half-smile waits until he’s speaking. Then he grins. “Hi.”

“Uh.” My face gets hotter. I twist up my mouth; its corners pull at the tension buried in my cheeks. I flutter a hand around my face. A urge to laugh trembles in my chest. “I, uh…” I roll my eyes. “Have a really huge dumb grin on my face right now, don’t I?”

He nods, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Yes.” He chuckles. “You do.”

“My, uh…” I lift a foot, curl it around the back of my ankle. I tilt my head. My eyebrows go up. I move hair behind both ears. I grin. “My sisters call this the stupid look.”

“I’d offer you a ride, but…”

I toss my hair back & think _did you really just_. I blush harder. Giggle. Touch my lips. I hug myself with one arm, fling a spastic gesture at my driveway. My blood deserting its usual post. My head weightless. “My house is twenty feet away.”

“You’re adorable.”

“Yeah, I…” I cover my bright red face with my hands. “I’m sorry, I…” I shake my head, laugh. I let my hands drop. “Have no control over my body right now.”

He tilts his head at my driveway. “Shall I?”

“Yes.” I’m still grinning. I cross one foot over the over, lean into a step. “Please, by all means.”

He chuckles. The window hums all the way up & the rental car—I think it’s a Cadillac—rolls ahead. I take slow steps, fan my face. I watch it swing around in a wide curve that lands its long body between the cherry red of my company car & a row of big battered trashcans.

My phone buzzes.

[Jon] Yr putting horrible pictures in my head  
[Me] I’ve gotta go  
[Jon] Why?

His car door slams.

[Me] My ride is here  
[Jon] So?  
[Me] Oh never mind, ride is a metaphor & a clunky one at that  
[Jon] OMG YR 6’8” RIDE  
[Me] Good night, Jonathan

I put the phone on silent. I keep walking, reach out & caress the Cadillac’s flank as I pass by. Its metal still warm.

My back door light casts frosted metallic yellow across the faded white concrete, new-looking chrome, smoked & slanted window glass. I keep moving until my front runs up against his; he takes all the fade in my forward motion, holds it in his joints. His arms go around me. I lean into him & inhale, lose the scents of dusty alleyway oleander and my neighbor’s orange blossoms; I put them to bed with salted seersucker, wilted aftershave, mint & the miles—the long hours of this day, both airborne & not—still hanging off the familiar scent of his skin. I squeeze.

“Are you gonna cry?”

I shake my head. “No.”

His voice passes through a throat twitch on its way to my hair. “It’s OK if you do.”

“No, I…” _Crying’s done_. “I’ve already cried a lot.”

“I can tell.”

“It’s…been a long day,” I whisper.

He laughs, his voice threadbare. “That’s an understatement.”

I stand with his body forgiving my weight & a slow hothouse heat building between us for—I don’t know, time lets go of me & lets me drift. A blood-kindness.

He guides one soft hand beneath the weight of my hair. My breath turns back on itself. I notice the damp cold, shiver a little. He squeezes the back of my neck. My mouth opens. I notice my pulse, the way it stirs up & out of my muscles. His thumb rubs the shade beneath my earlobe & even though my spine sparks & everything below my waist drops like a curling wave into an endless warm tide, even though the inside of my mouth itches at the sense of gravity & the inside of my pelvis clenches around a memory of the long stinging match-scratch in his voice, even though my skin struggles to hold up an endless cascade of goosebumps, I force my voice out of its hibernation.

“Did she throw you out?”

He controls the descent of his voice. “Yeah.”

I nod. “OK.”

I extricate myself from the kiss that’s waiting to happen. I leave his trailing arms, go to my little wooden gate.

I look back at him. His mouth makes a firm line & his eyes won’t leave my face. He doesn’t breathe.

I open the gate, step aside. “After you.”

He blinks. His lips part. His expression trembles & his chest unlocks, expands. His face softens. His shoulders slump.


	30. that feeling when

Your boss—or rather your old boss—re-enters your life.

_Re-enters_ :

If the first cut is the deepest, the last stitch is the hardest.

To ascend hurts dull & sweet, like the mindless fingering of your most precious wound. Your skin pops, depressurizes. Carries blood & rain. You breathe in storms, look around. Breathe out salt. There’s a memory of ice at your feet, of being cold, but heat rises.

So do you.

This atmosphere loves you—with kisses, her soft cloud arms, her thunder mama voice—all the way up into space. It won’t grab & pull like gravity does. That bitch demands her payment in ash & light but an embryonic atmosphere—all she wants to do is untether. To bid her planet a gentle goodbye.

There is less of you now, but that’s OK.

Heavy things won’t fly.

_Your_ :

Name is a map. A pair of crosshairs, a new goal—like a body, it cannot live without oxygen but oh how it sings under the right circumstances

Your hair is a natural phenomenon. A living sea, I mean…look at all those waves. Those currents. In her surliest mood, she has been known to take a life out pure spite. Just for…y’know, funsies.

& your house is not a house; it’s just a pause.

& your heart is the space between notes.

& your breath is a promise cradled in a sling of wet on its way to distant territories.

But your dreams—they’re promises, too. Exhausted by their journeys of a thousand heartbeats, they arrive under cover of sleep to spread their spoils across a blanket on your floor.

Smile. Be kind. Watch them sparkle.

_Life_ :

Takes death to exist. Everyone knows that, I mean…ask a carrion eater w/a throat full of dancing maggots if she’ll sing your way back

& if you’re polite about it, she will. Don’t scorn that crackling noise echoing in the damp hollows of her head

& remember that forgetting ain’t apotheosis no matter who’s doing the preaching.

Remember your place

& don’t forget:

In another language, this riot means birth.


	31. *footnote

& when these lines come back to you, wrapped up in their tenderest skins, they’ll shoulder their way in through each drifting-down breath:

_—when lovers cry out to God in the night, what do you think it is they’re really saying?_

_—that there is so much love in this world that it’s like a flood sent to destroy._


	32. epilogue

06/09/2017 03:04 [Farrah] *throat clearing sounds* & now I’m going to tell you a little story  
06/09/2017 03:04 [Farrah] If I were feeling super extra deliciously cheeky & r/n I kind of am for ahem reasons—I am the cheekiest cheek who ever cheeked, it’s nauseating  
06/09/2017 03:05 [Farrah] (Look don’t judge me OK)  
06/09/2017 03:06 [Farrah] I could title it something like Random Woman Goes to the Wrong House vs The Mysterious Blue Escalade You Kept Noticing in Your Backyard Neighbor’s Driveway  
06/09/2017 03:06 [Farrah] (You Know, The One That Your Backyard Neighbor Kept Nimbly Dodging All Your Questions About)  
06/09/2017 03:06 [Farrah] OK so…here it is  
06/09/2017 03:06 [Farrah] ***SPOILER ALERT***  
06/09/2017 03:07 [Farrah] The Escalade belongs to the random woman’s husband  
06/09/2017 06:16 [Julie] ????  
06/09/2017 06:17 [Julie] !!!!

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Kris Kraus's _I Love Dick_.
> 
> P.S. - Wow...three kudos & one bookmark before I even finished posting the thing...it warms my heart. Thanks, guys. <3


End file.
